Shade Point

REVIEW The Greatcoat by Helen Dunmore

2012-02-18T00:53:00.001-08:00

For those of us who grew up sneakily watching late night BBC re-runs of Taste the Blood of Dracula the re-emergence of Hammer is a joy. What has been really impressive is the fact that the company seems determined to work on some really exciting things - The Woman in Black, for example, and Let Me In.

It came as a surprise when it was announced that Hammer would be starting a fiction imprint, and a surprise again when the company excelled themselves by signing up Helen Dunmore as their first writer in a series (to include Jeanette Winterson, Melvin Burgess and Tim Lebbon). Now, Helen Dunmore is simply one of the best writers in the country; it really is a standout signing for Hammer. Not someone who writes in the supernatural genres - Dunmore is more recently known for her recent Leningrad sequence of The Siege and The Betrayal - it was still a coup that made perfect sense. From the beginning of her career - a book like the haunting Zennor in Darkness - she has been unafraid as a writer to explore the dark side of life and love, hope and loss. One only needs to look at her recent National Prize-winning poem 'The Malarkey' to see how she can dwell in realm of the chilling and mysterious. Her win for that piece was no one-off, either; Helen Dunmore is also an exceptionally talented poet.

So, this seemed an inspired piece of casting, and by and large the resulting book, The Greatcoat, is a triumph. That does seem slightly qualified, and it is, but more on that later.

This short book - novella perhaps - is set in Yorkshire in 1954. The spectre of World War Two still stalks the shadows as newly married Isabel Carey struggles to settle to her new life as 'the Doctor's wife' in a lean world of rationing and reconstruction. Her husband is out on call most of the time, and in her solitude she tussles with Steak and Kidney Pies, fatty meat from the butcher, and gossipers who spot her isolation yards away. To make matters worse, her new flat is cold and forbidding, and the landlady, a bleak character with little social skills, is prone to pacing the floors above at all times, and does not make this life any more welcoming.

Into this dour picture arrives the greatcoat. Frozen one night, Isabel looks through some of the 'furnished flat' items for some extra source of warmth, and finds an old RAF greatcoat. When she wraps herself in this for the first time, she has no idea of the crack in time this act will open. Without throwing out too many spoilers, the greatcoat - like Professor Parkins and his whistle - will serve as the join between the real world, and the world of the other.

What follows is a beautifully written and extremely moving story. It is a love story, I think, and it vividly captures the particularly heart wrenching world of the RAF flight crew - where on 'ops' they face terrible danger and distress, and yet when they return must find a way to fit back in to the civil conventions of war time England, day to day. Each hurried kiss with a sweetheart might be the last, and then the next, and the next. Alec, the airman in this story, seems worn to the point of brittleness by it all. The scenes between Alec and Isabel as they float around the dancefloors and mess halls of an airbase that is one moment alive, the next a shadow, is reminscent of Jack Torrance's nights at the bar in The Overlook. Dunmore captures the era incredibly well, and for the first time - and this is a result of reading the book - this reviewer has started to sense just how far away it is all getting - slowly the Second War is moving as distant as the First in the imagination. There are very real ghosts in this book.

What of my slightly cagey comments before? Well, I think there is no getting away from it. The book is published by Hammer. It is marketed as a ghost story. Is it scary?

The answer, on one level, has to be no, I'm afraid. For me, the gold standard here is Susan Hill's The Woman in Black, a book that Hammer has now filmed. Some people are scared by different things in fiction, but that book scared the wits out of me. The unique, one-off combinations of place, character, imagery simply elevate that book to the top of the list. Like writing good comedy, writing scary is very hard to achieve. The Woman in Black succeeds, and then some. It sets a high bar, so much so that even Hill herself has struggled, I feel, to repeat the trick. One thing I hope for the new film version - I haven't seen it yet - is that it helps cement Hill's original book as one the great Twentieth Century supernatural classics - to be spoken of in times to come as we speak of Stoker, or MR James. That it was itself a kind of homage to earlier supernatural fiction should not, I think, steal away its right to real status.

The Greatcoat just isn't scary on that level. There are one or two chilly moments, and a scene towards the end that has a bit of hair raising about it, but on the whole it isn't a book that will demand you have all the lights on when you're reading it. But, and I think this is important, it is a book that if you think about it too much afterwards, may well make you reach for the bedside light. The ambience of the book, its darkness and emptiness, and certain set pieces - the old landlady dragging herself back and forth in the night, the waltzing on leaves and rust - have a particularly eerie quality that sustains. Most importantly, the haunting of the emotions, the closeness of darkness at any point, the closeness of loss, the fragility of the every day, becomes deeply unsettling. No more is this the case than in the last parts of the book - which I found incredibly mysterious and affecting.There is a search after meaning which is not at all contrived, and is, I feel, a heartfelt connection with what is most profound about ghost story writing.

REVIEW Dregs by Jørn Lier Horst

2012-02-17T00:39:00.004-08:00

Dregs by Jorn Lier Hørst is a very fine crime novel. It is the sixth in a series featuring Norwegian detective William Wisting, but only the first to be published in this country. Hopefully it will be a success, and we can see the rest of the series translated as soon as possible.

Comparing this weary, health-anxious Police Inspector, dispirited and yet relentless in pursuit, to Wallander is of course fairly obvious. Measuring Scandinavian crime procedural novels to Mankell's, either negatively or positively, is indeed almost a review staple - not as much now maybe since The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo - but Mankell does operate as a kind of weather vane every time a new writer comes along. Much to my surprise, Dregs is actually the nearest to Mankell I have come across. I'm not saying that it is simple pastiche, and there are familiarities (Wisting's adventurous grown daughter, for example - a journalist in this series, but equally prone to scrapes), but more that Jorn Lier Hørst has crafted settings and characters that are every bit as involving and impressive as Kurt, Linda and company.

Severed left feet are washing up on the midsummer beaches near Stavern. With echoes of the early scenes in Jaws this creates a mounting tension amongst the detectives, and a steadily complicated media background.Wisting and his team immediately begin linking this gruesome flotsam with a series of missing person cases, and piece by piece they grind their way towards a conclusion which readers may have an inkling on, but remains shocking nonetheless. Like Wallander, Wisting manages this against a barrage of health concerns and symptoms, anxiety over a new relationship, concerns for his daughter, for the state of the world, for life itself. It is in this sense, really, that Wisting resembles Wallander - he is an impeccably drawn character that is shown with great skill to simply carry heavily the concerns of his age and life. Yes, there are superficial resemblances, but there are as many differences. Wisting's wife, for example, has died. This adds an entirely different dimension to his character - Wallander's relationship wih his ex-wife after their divorce is a very different situation.

Jorn Lier Hørst also writes with that plain spoken, easy voice that is a feature not just of Mankell, but many Scandinavian crime writers. Where this works very well is in the depiction of Wisting's internal thought patterns, his devices and desires - we are made aware of them almost as fleetingly as the clouds, darkness and rain that are such a powerful recurring descriptive feature of this novel. I think what this simplicity achieves is a strong sense of humanity - ordinary humanity, if that makes sense. The great weight of these events does not fall from the back of characters like Wisting - at this point, the sixth in the series, the reader encounters a man almost distilled in this life, these experiences.

For all this cool internal dialogue, the novel is well-paced and is a very compelling page turner. The gradual discovery of leads and clues is completely engrossing, and even if the reader is sometimes one or two steps ahead of the detectives, it is never the case that the next events are completely telegraphed in any way, or a let down. I was completely hooked. The novel finally builds towards a familiar dual peril trajectory that means the last one hundred pages or so have to be read in one sitting. Top stuff.

Sandstone Press's publication of 'Dregs' is supported financially by Creative Scotland. Well done them - it is hugely valuable that they support adventurous independent publishers to share the best in genre fiction in translation. Dregs is exactly that.

You can read a good interview with the author here.

REVIEW Eye of the Red Tsar by Sam Eastland

2012-02-14T00:15:00.003-08:00

The only way to have a future in this country is to have no past

I really enjoyed this book. It's an escapist entertainment, and although it makes some chilling observations on the Russian Revolution era and leaves the reader with much to think about, it is predominantly a thriller, and is none the worse for that.

Inspector Pekkala, our hero, a kind of personal investigator for Tsar Nicholas II, has been banished to the Gulag after the Revolution. After years isolated in the wilderness, living like a ghost marking trees to be cut down by people who never see him, he is miraculously dragged back into the world of the living. Once a cherished agent of the Tsar, suddenly he is required to serve a new master: Stalin.

Pekkala's task is to investigate the horrifying murders of the Tsar and his family in that terrible basement in Yekaterinburg. This of course, becomes a hugely personal task for Pekkala, a voyage into loss, guilt and disappeared love. Parallel to the investigation, Eastland goes back in time to describe Pekkala's ascent from unfavoured second son of a Finnish undertaker, to the 'Emerald Eye', an all-powerful minder for the Tsar - known for the jewelled badge of special rank given to him by Nicholas himself.

There are some vivid set pieces - Pekkala's grim descent into a mine shaft containing the bodies of the Romanovs, a surreal trip through a Potemkin village, the descriptions of Pekkala's hellish imprisonment after the Revolution. Eastland balances the historical back story with live events well, and maintains a tension in both narratives, which can be hard to achieve. Occasionally, as is often the case with Twentieth Century historical novels, for me at least, when a character like Stalin appears, there is a breach in the suspension of disbelief - somehow I find it impossible not to wonder if the real Stalin would say this, act like that, be this person on the page.

I'm a huge fan of Cruz Smith's Arkady series. As such, a thriller set in Russia, in whichever era, is pushing at an open door for me. I'm drawn I think to these cold landscapes, rather like the Scandinavian crime novels, places of bleakness and mystery. Eye of the Red Tsar is well written, and in a moving historical epilogue, clearly does not borrow the central act lightly - the deaths of the Romanovs is very sensitively handled. In fact, the novel rather impels you to find out more about it - and I think that is a real sign of success in historical fiction.

There are another two novels in this series; I'll look forward to reading them. Eye of the Red Tsar has the feel of an origin story, and I believe that unfettered by Pekkala's backstory, the series might take off completely.

REVIEW The Dead of Summer by Mari Jungstedt

2012-01-29T01:44:00.000-08:00

Pia Lilja, an ambitious young journalist in Gotland, rails at one point in this fine novel about the mundane kind of story she has to deal with: "disputes about putting in a new road in Burgsvik, or the complaints of students about the poor quality of the food served in the school cafeteria in Hemse, or the drama of the local championship in throwing the varpa, a flat round stone, to get closest to the pin."

In Mari Jungstedt's Gotland, however, much like Colin Dexter's Oxford, things will not stay sleepy for long. In this fifth book in her series starring Andreas Knutas and his team in the Gotland police, the book is only seconds old when a holidaymaker is riddled with bullets a morning run away from his caravan. Readers of the books so far will relish re-connecting with familiar characters and their troubled lives as the novel unfolds. I feel it is perhaps not as strong a book as the other one I've read in the chain, Unseen, but it is still a very good read.

Jungstedt's focus to a large extent - and this is a feature of Scandinavian crime writers, I feel - is on the people who inhabit the story. She concentrates on the lives of the officers as they battle to solve the crime, and spends time on their personal stories and the way they interact, and how they have done over previous books in the series. There is one superb scene in particular, where Knutas is dragged out for drinks by his colleagues, that has the deepest ring of truth to it. These little asides of characterisation are expertly done, and like Wallander and Co., it is hard not to care a great deal about these very normal, human investigators - and journalists - as they work their way through life.

This is an important strength, because Jundgstedt dispenses very deliberately with a great deal of the narrative tension very, very early - so it is the case that most readers will be well aware of every rut and puddle in the garden path the detectives struggle along initially. This is a brave device, because it creates a a more calm, thoughtful insight, rather than heady tension, mystery and thrills. Once suspects that Jungstedt is far more interested in and determined to relate the human weights and measures at the heart of every detective story, rather than baffle the reader and surround them in chaos. A bit more mystery might not have gone amiss, but there is something very impressive about the way the novel simply allows the novel's resolution to almost fall before the detectives, perhaps in the way such procedural might happen in real life.

Mari Jungstedt is a fine writer, and this quietly enjoyable novel is yet another compelling piece of evidence to suggest that Scandinavian writers remain the stars of the genre.

REVIEW The Light Between Oceans by M.L. Stedman

2012-01-24T05:38:00.000-08:00

Perhaps when it comes to it, no-one is just the worst thing they ever did.

The Light Between Oceans is not a mystery novel as Shade Point's normal fare understands it; nor is it a ghost story. And yet, it has a great heart of mystery, and every single page feels haunted one way or another. Every character, it seems, lives in a world of ghosts every waking day. This combination builds a novel that has an almost otherworldy sense of loss and longing about it, drifting across every action and every utterance.

It is Australia, 1926. Tom and Isabel Sherborne live a seemingly blissful life running the isolated Janus lighthouse. Their idyll is destroyed when they are visited by a series of personal tragedies, and when a dinghy washes on the rocks containing a stranger's corpse and a tiny baby, miraculously still alive, they make a fateful decision.

This decision is placed right up front in a novel that then weaves the reader back and forth through different times and inhabits the memories of multiple connected characters. Stedman places Tom and Isabel's terrible moment of choice right up front and straight away, maybe, to challenge the reader to the same dilemma without giving them any time to get to know the people, the lie of the land; just to be in there at the moment of extreme decision. In this sense, The Light Between Oceans shares something with the mystery genre - from the very first pages a fierce tension is ground for all else to follow. The predicament of Tom and Isabel is such a stunning premise, I feel, that it is impossible not to be hooked.

Tom Sherborne has survived the horrors of the Great War trenches, and it is obvious early on, as he seeks out the solitude of Janus, that he only barely manages daily to escape "the darkness, back into the galleries of wounded flesh and twisted limbs". A new life with Isabel, to Tom, seems inexplicable, unbelievable and undeserved, and as such their relationship is always heightened, fevered almost, in a way that feeds the anxiety in the novel. Right from the beginning we know that Tom has reservations about their actions, that he knows what he is doing is wrong, but wounded as he is, so deeply in love as he is, he is unable to take a different path.

The isolation of the lighthouse drives the progress of the plot, with the great light beaming miles and miles out to sea, but the island below, and Tom and Isabel, seemingly shielded in darkness. That they can not remain in darkness forever, creates the creeping, sweating tension that drives the story. Unwitting accomplice, the reader has no choice but to keep with them. Like the best mystery stories, the great tension of choice, of right and wrong, good and bad, is at the core of this novel. The reader is constantly adjusting position, constantly searching their own sense of the thing to do, their own sliding scale for 'good people who do bad things'.

Tom may have been "over there" but the whole of the town of Partageuse, nearest landfall to Janus, has also been wounded by the war in some way - Isabel's family included. Indeed, an overwhelming sense of the missing pervades the novel, as if at the heart of it all is a great collective grief that drives the events - often when they might seem otherwise melodramatic. The ghosts of the missing and dead whisper all throughout the story, and nearly every character has this deep personal connection to the war, or the war has created other connections for them. Those who don't have this association, in the end, are the ones who act with the least humanity as the story unfolds. Mostly this desperate sadness is about parents and their children, about losing and re-finding, maybe losing again. Only the biggest literary cynic of a parent, I suspect, will be able to read the novel and remain unmoved. In moments, the book is heart breakingly sad.

The lighthouse, Janus Rock, is beautifully created. The gleaming light and its shining casing is wonderfully evoked as Tom tends to its every need and "the glass gleams, the brass shines, and the light rotates on its bath of mercury as smoothly as a skua gliding on the currents of air". The surrounding landscape with its shipwreck cemetery and hidden inlets and pools is strikingly observed. The way Stedman creates Partageuse, with its steady murmur of different voices, memories and quick snapshots of characters passing the narrative by, in some ways reminded me a bit of Stephen King. Maybe not a real influence, perhaps, but the way this small town steps into the imagination without show or great digression, is similar to King, who is the master of it, I feel.

The sense of isolation, of otherness, both on the Rock itself and in the emotional casting out in the town, is superbly created. Although it does not share its all-pervading darkness, there is something in this novel, perhaps the setting mostly, that reminded me of that emotional bludgeoning Shade Point endured at the hands of Henning Mankell's Depths last year. It also reminds me a little of The Weight of Water by Anita Shreve, which had a similarly haunted sense about it - a kind of pulse of foreboding running through the chapters like the beam of the Janus Rock light. Curiously, I found myself remembering the brilliant Two Prisoners by Lajos Zilahy, a love story dragged up from the very distant reading past. Something, I think, of the headlong trajectory of love was similar between the two books. Some novels just stick, I suppose.

It will be interesting to see where this novel goes when it comes out. It could quite easily become one of the books of the year - it has that sort of quality to it, where it transcends genre and creates an impetus all of its own towards becoming a bestseller. I'm thinking here of a kind of Time Traveler's Wife sort of 'happening'. Apparently, quite a few people thought the same, as the manuscript was the subject of a nine way bidding war between publishers. That has to say something - for a debut novel, too. We'll have to wait and see.

Some novels just stay with you, as I say, and do so for any number of reasons. Perhaps they are read at a particular time in one's life, or they are a gift from a particular person. Often, I think, they stay with us because of the imaginative depth of the premise, because of the dilemma this places the characters in, and therefore the reader too. They can stay with us because they create such a uniqueness of setting in time and place, that is then impossible to find again, or re-create. For me, these last two reasons apply particularly to The Light Between Oceans.

BOOK OF THE YEAR 2011: Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End by Leif GW Persson

2012-01-02T04:45:00.000-08:00

2011 turned out to be a divided reading year in the lighthouse. The first half, I'd say, seemed packed with all the really enjoyable books. In fact, all the contenders for Book of the Year came from that period. Therefore, there are three very honourable mentions for Henning Mankell's The Troubled Man, the audacious and great fun, The Map of Time by Felix Palma and the superb An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas.

In the end though, I couldn't see further than Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End by Leif GW Persson. Of all the books I read last year, it is the one that has stuck with me the most. I'll be honest, at times, I remember struggling with the sheer scope of it, but by the time it was finished, I felt that I had read something important, a novel of such significance that I would be unlikely to forget it. And so it has proved. My review is here.

The very best of wishes to everyone for 2012.

REVIEW The House of Silk by Anthony Horowitz

2011-12-25T03:08:00.000-08:00

The last few months haven't been smooth reading here in the lighthouse. Somehow, one book after another hasn't really measured up. This may just be a natural order asserting itself - taking care of an imbalance from a rare run of brilliant books in the first half of the year.

It's not that I'm about to say The House of Silk is a bad novel - far from it - but I am going to say that I was largely disappointed. Disappointed mostly because I had been waiting all year to read it. Fooled by hype again, to some extent. I was longing for the book to come out because I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan - I love the originals, and would probably go as far as to say that my life was entirely changed from encountering them at a young age. The Canon read and re-read (and re-read again), I have enjoyed numerous pastiches over the years. Some of them I have loved for their audacity (Michael Dibdin's The Last Sherlock Holmes Story, for example) and some for their hugely endearing re-creations of Doyle's world - Barrie Roberts, maybe, or June Thomson. I have even enjoyed Holmes being re-located to America in the series by Larry Millett. And of course, there's a special place for all the Nicholas Meyer books.

So, you'd think this new work, authorised by the Conan Doyle estate, would be right up my pea souper-filled street. Unfortunately not. Likeable enough to make it on the site, but a classic?

There are many positives. Horowitz paced this novel perfectly. He has the thriller knack, that's for certain. Some of the writing, dialogue and descriptive turns are superb. In many ways too, particularly in the first half, he perfectly exploited the now familiar device of an aged Watson finally unburdening himself of one of those cases for which the world just wasn't ready, etc. The emotional interplay between Holmes and Watson is occasionally spot on, and like all good pastiches, for a large part of the story it was a case of diving very gratefully into familiar waters. This, I think, is always the draw of the pastiche - once we have read the very last, the last ever, Conan Doyle Sherlock Holmes, it means a rare kind of sadness. Assuaged of course by reading them all over again. But still there is a hunger for more. Pastiches well done are always a pleasure. And not even a guilty one.

There is a kind of revisionist Holmes to House of Silk, though. This business of it being "New" I suppose. Watson is ready to go gentle into the good night, so he is weighing up his life with Holmes with an acute sense of right and wrong. Largely this works, but occasionally it just doesn't. Holmes and Watson agonise over the use of the Baker Street Irregulars for example - when the Irregulars were really just a piece of escapist fun, and I think this novel makes too much of this. Obviously, it's completely justified in the plot development, but for some reason seems contrived. Watson is also concerned he just hasn't given enough print time to Mrs Hudson. This is baffling - she is such a vivid character in the originals that this apologia just seems daft. Conan Doyle himself, I believe, felt Holmes to be his lighter work, and his historical works the more serious. Time has imbued greater weight to the men of 221b but even still, there's little need to surgically insert different agendas now, I think, however right or modern they may be. The Holmes stories, gloriously, just are what they are. And don't let me get started on Moriarty ...

Above all, though, the denouement, the great crime at the heart of the narrative, is just predictable from early on, and also, I believe, thematically a bit of a Victorian crime cliche of recent years. I won't say what it is, because there's lots to enjoy about this book, but seasoned crime readers will figure it out well in advance. In the end, well, the end is one Conan Doyle would never have written - perhaps because of the moral imperatives and censorship of the day, but maybe too because he just wouldn't. There is something about the innocence somehow of the original Holmes stories, despite the huge body count and occasionally macabre detail - that will always be hugely enjoyable. The streets were dark, sure, but the narratives left some of the worst shadows unexplored. Like many television productions recently, the trip into the far darker reaches seems somehow out of place. And therefore, somehow, it feels like someone using Conan Doyle's characters to tell their own story. Which, I suppose, of course, Horowitz is doing. Maybe I'm just too cranky and over-critical - the book seems to have had widespread hit reviews. But then again, I read one reviewer who said that this was good Holmes, but bad Conan Doyle. I think I know what he means. .

The game, then, is afoot once more, but with revised rules for an even newer century.

For a very interesting Sherlockian take on the book, click here.

REVIEW Heartstone by C.J. Sansom

2011-12-02T01:09:00.000-08:00

I have been a huge fan of the Shardlake series since Dissolution. I love historical mystery fiction. More than anything, what struck me about that first book, and to this day, is the strength of Shardlake as a character. Like all the best mystery novels, the success of the main investigator as a character is of paramount importance. Shardlake seemed inspired to me, very human, noble and brave. He has his weaknesses, which he seems free to admit to - pride perhaps, stubborness - but he has achieved gentleman status, wealth and some influence, against the odds. In Tudor times, this "crookback lawyer" is as apt to be scapegoated and given the evil eye as he is to move in the court of Kings and Queens. And yet, he does, frequently risking life and limb with his trusty assistant Barak, often at the behest of such royalty and privilege. Always though, it is for the sake of good and truth that he does risk all in the end.

I'm also hugely interested in Tudor times, and the Shardlake series, whether in the endangered monasteries or the great seething dens of London, brings this era vividly to life. In Heartstone, Shardlake and Barak head for Portsmouth, on the service of Queen Catherine herself, who has taken the side of a servant whose life has turned to tragedy. On the way, Shardlake has a mystery of his own to unravel, and will risk his life again as the two journeys cross. They intersect at the height of The Battle of the Solent, as the Mary Rose takes to the sea, and the threat of French invasion crackles across the channel.

So far so good. And I did enjoy the novel. But, and this is the first time there has ever been a 'but' with a Shardlake novel, I have to say that it took me a long time to read it. It seems almost unthinkable to say this about one of my favourite writers, but in truth, this book would have benefited from being at least 150 pages shorter. In the previous novels, I never found the historical detail to get in the way of the story, the pace of events, but here it did. Without giving too much away, and there is an historical note at the end of the book that perhaps carries the explanation, there is often just too much detail - the practices of the archers, the clothing of soldiers, the nature of this, the description of that. On one or two occasions - particularly towards the end of the novel where things take speed - there are frequent sections of historical detail that to be frank, just get in the way. So much so, that by the time the grand finale arrived, and the Mary Rose drifted into view, any digression into historical detail sapped my energy to read on. I'm not sure if other Shardlake fans found this, but I did, and longed for the dark, pacy twists and turns of the early novels. Those novels were filled with classic Shardlake moments - a hair raising precipice here, a sudden discovery there. For me, Heartstone was about 250 pages in before one of those moments arrived.

So why am I reviewing it here? Shade Point has a policy of only reviewing 'enjoyed' books. Well, because when I finished it, I was glad I had read it. I love Shardlake and would read about him all day long on a good day, and that admiration doesn't just fall away with one book. Towards the end the novel did pick up pace and I felt on more familiar ground. The unravelling and then weaving of two plots that seemed destined to keep well away from each other was skillfully done. Overall, Sansom's skill in finding the sense of the past, the feel of the past, was still there - keeping secondary to the story almost, like his early books, creating a kind of pulse of history that is there to set the stage, but not so dense or contrived as to pull the reader out of a spell. Mostly. Heartstone makes for an engrossing historical novel maybe, but as a mystery it lacks the tension and dread of the novels before, and this is partly to do with too many instances of this overt 'history' and then to do with the effect this has on the novel's pace.

REVIEW 88 Killer by Oliver Stark

2011-08-04T00:53:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine once told me that the previous evening, completely out of character, he had to get out of bed to check his windows and doors were locked. Why? He was totally spooked by a book he had been reading. Normally unmoved by this kind of thing, the story had somehow given him the major creeps. The novel? The Silence of the Lambs, by Thomas Harris. The time? 1991, the same year the movie came out. Twenty years ago! I mean, twenty years ago!

Now, this was also around the time Kay Scarpetta first appeared. James Patterson's Alex Cross appeared a couple of years later. Val McDermid's Tony Hill and Carol Jordan got stuck into The Mermaids Singing in '95, while Bones first scraped away at a femur in 1997. Looking back, it all seems like a decade of great importance in the development of the crime fiction genre - the birth in many ways of the procedural and/or forensic serial killer novel as we more or less know it now. Of course there were other serial killer books and movies before this, I'm not suggesting this was completely new, just that there was, well, a bit of a movement that began with that book that had my friend double locking his back door at 3am - and particularly the Oscar winning film that brought it to an even greater audience. For example, Manhunter, based on Red Dragon, was already five years old by this time. The success of Silence of the Lambs, both film and book, sits somewhere very high or climbing on a major arc that profoundly changed the crime genre. For artistic reasons, yes, but also because they made vast amounts of money.

At the risk of boring any reader witless, I'm also going to throw another two movies into this thinking. The first being Seven (1995). In many senses I think this film influenced the literary movement I'm discussing here - bringing with it a new emphasis on the kind of super-pattern, the 'quirky' surreal MO that has become such a feature of the types of books that have followed Harris. It was, and remains, a howling demon of a film. Tense, horrifying, emotionally draining. By the early 2000s we were of course nearing the overkill - if you'll pardon the pun - of the Saw franchise. Maybe not the first one, but the rest surely. Then Hostel, then all that came after that. Serial killer novels as a genre followed suit, to greatly diminishing returns. Now, in 2011, bookshelves are groaning with them on the high street, in the airport, the library. They seem big business, and yet, sadly, lots of them are fairly poor. In fact, out of all the books that end up unreviewed here at Shade Point, they are by far the most likely to get the boot. Somehow the crime genre and horror genre had been spliced back in 1991: like a Brundle Fly, early signs were encouraging, but honestly, it wasn't going to end well.

PD James wrote about a serial killer, The Norfolk Whistler, in 1989. The novel is Devices and Desires. It is a British crime genre masterpiece. Within a few years, its restraint, deep humanity and intelligence would seem distinctly old school in a world of razor wire, numerical patterning, sealed cellars, etc etc. Crime novels now had to be shocking, terrifying. They had to scare us in new ways. Some did, Mark Billingham is a very fine writer, for example, but others were just exploitative nonsense. They had tripped over on the way past escapism, into something horrible. Great writers, like Henning Mankell, and the whole Scandinavian movement itself in some ways, have since come along to remind us of the need for more developed context, for human context in fact, for context in terms of plot - the complexity of horror and crime as entertainment, the purpose of writing it, its relationship to society, are burdens heavily carried by these writers. And yet, and this is the important thing, they still write hugely entertaining and thrilling books.

Oliver Stark's 88 Killer is part of the Harris Inheritance, I think. Although written by a Londoner, it is set in New York, and follows NYPD detective Tom Harper and psychologist Denise Levene, both fresh from an earlier nightmare in the book that precedes this one, as they conduct a desperate search for a serial killer abroad in the city. The crimes are horrifying. As the novel proceeds, they begin to find the patterns, and the hunt intensifies. In places, the novel is nightmarish, and Harper and Levene face increasingly grotesque and terrible things as they struggle to the end, sometimes to the extent that credibility is stretched. There is an almost Hollywood grand finale that doesn't quite work.The novel is undeniably a page turner, and where other serial killer thrillers often get the hook after a few chapters, this one did keep me reading, and I did want to know where it was all going to end - even if I had a very early suspicion (right as it turned out) where that was going to be. Harper and Levene are engaging characters, although they occasionally go in for a bit too much exposition instead of natural dialogue - particularly at the end of the novel and in one interrogation scene that just doesn't seem credible in the first place. The novel makes me think quite a bit of those early McDermid novels, but relocated to New York. What it lacks, I think, is the believability of McDermid. It has a sort of screenplay scope which means that while you can easily see the bullets fly on the big screen, seems incredibly crammed in a novel.

REVIEW The Quarry by Johan Theorin

2011-07-17T00:19:00.000-07:00

Johan Theorin's The Quarry has been my most eagerly anticipated book of the year. I loved Echoes From The Dead and The Darkest Room was, well, a bit of a masterpiece - and the Shade Point Book of the Year for last year.

Theorin is a brilliant writer, and in this Öland Quartet, he has created the most engaging crime fiction series I have read for some considerable time. Welcome back then retired sea skipper Gerlof Davidsson, one of the most unique and marvellous sleuths on the go. And welcome back to Öland, an island both beautiful and mysterious, a place of dark folklore and legend. The books are crime novels, and then again, they are not. They exist almost in a category of their own, where crime genre conventions meet myth and storytelling out on the mist covered Alvar - a kind of mystical borderland between sea and humankind.

In this novel, Per Morner has inherited the house by the quarry - which will be familiar to readers of the earlier books. He receives a sinister call for help from his father Jerry, which is to lead him deep into a world of murder and intrigue. Along the way, Gerlof helps him to uncover the darker, troubled history of Jerry Morner. Laced into this, as is always the case with Theorin, are undercurrents of folktale - trolls, elves, changelings - and a great deal about the history of these fabulous islands. I recommend The Quarry highly, it's a great read, but probably also recommend you read the books in sequence - start with Echoes and work your way forward from there. Or at least, don't read this one first.

I say this because I have to admit The Quarry is probably not as successful as its predecessors in the Öland series. Not a bad book by any means, it's great, but it just doesn't quite hit the heights of The Darkest Room. I'm not even sure this is even a criticism. It's a bit like the ghost novels of Susan Hill I suppose. She has written several and they're all delicious in their own way, but none of them have quite achieved the deadly storytelling of The Woman in Black. So, in places The Darkest Room was genuinely scary - it has at least one outright 'hairs-on-the-neck' moment that is quite unforgettable. The tension in that book builds and never lets go. The Quarry is definitely tense, and superbly written, but never quite achieves the abandonment of disbelief, the total immersion of Darkest Room. Just at times I found myself stepping out of the narrative, maybe thinking such and such a development was a bit too convenient, or noting the absence of menace or otherworldliness that so characterised the early books in the series.

But, I'm uncomfortable criticising this book too much, or criticising it for, well, basically not being another book. It is still Theorin. He still captures the raw beauty and isolation of the islands with great skill, Gerlof is still wonderful, still completely Gerlof. He is Gerlof in the way Adamsberg is Adamsberg, Wallander is Wallander and so on. The characterisation is spot on as always - understanding, human, thought provoking. The book still reads off the page at a rate of knots, and it was still a shame when it ended. The final book in the series is now my new most-waited-for book. Theorin remains a masterly writer and if this novel isn't as near perfect as his last one, it is still head and shoulders above lots of things I've read this year.

REVIEW Depths by Henning Mankell

2011-06-05T04:09:00.000-07:00

He was a solitary man. His solitary nature was like an abyss that he was afraid he might one day fall into. He had worked out that the abyss must be at least forty metres deep, and that he would leap into it head first, so as to be certain of dying ...

We interrupt this programme for a sort of emotional Shipping Forecast: Depths is a grim, terrible read. If you're not in the market for an extremely depressing book, then abandon ship here, I'd say.

Mankell's Wallander novels, particularly the elegiac closer The Troubled Man, have more than their fair share of bleakness. Wallander frequently seems clinically depressed, and as much as he battles crime, he also spends the series struggling with the human condition. His own condition mostly, but in general too. But, there are thriller structures and detective story conventions at work, and frequent bursts of dark humour to lighten the darkness. Not to mention an overwhelming compassion and love between some of the characters that is such a strong feature of the books.

I searched in vain for the lightness in Depths. It is one of the bleakest novels I have ever read. From the very beginning, depicting a desperate escape from an asylum, it is clear the novel will not be happy. As the title strongly hints, there is only a relentless descent into the darkest depths of existence.

It is 1914, and while the rest of the world is plunged into war, Sweden sits nervously in neutrality. In the surrounding sea, Russian and German battleships are at war. Naval officer Lars Tobiasson-Svartmann is sent on a secret mission to chart the depths of the channels around the Stockholm archipelago to help the country prepare its naval strategy. Against all odds, in something cut from a folktale or dark little legend from the pages of a Saga, he encounters a woman who lives alone on one of the tiny skerries, her husband having been lost at the fishing. Despite the fact that he is married to Kristina back home in Stockholm, he becomes obsessed with this woman of the rocks and sea. The obsession will lead to murder and madness.

Often, it feels like this novel could have been written in a different century. With apologies for mentioning him on this blog again it has something of Knut Hamsun about it. Maybe even a darker, more psychotic A Hero of Our Time or Raskolnikov, even. In typically rambling Shade Point style, I think what I'm trying to say is that Tobiasson-Svartmann seems like one of these contradictory, troubled young men of that era who make inexplicable decisions based on inexplicable passions, leaving the reader's jaw on the floor as tragedy unfolds. As other reviewers have noted, there is a touch of Tom Ripley to him too, largely because of the stunning canopy of lies Tobiasson-Svartmann constructs to hide his deeds. But he's in worse shape than Ripley, this Swedish naval man, much worse - and that's saying something. He seems to belong to an older, darker order. There is a sort of complete unravelling of his character as the novel proceeds, and from a fairly odd, if relatively likeable early impression, he is attacking someone with a hammer, killing a cat, descending and descending into the abyss. At times it is so horrible, it's a struggle to read on.

A reason to read on is the marvellous depiction of this jagged world of tiny islands and frozen seas. There is something at once utterly beautiful and haunting about this setting, the loneliness and darkness of it, the isolation. It lifts to life from the page, and the ice feels real, the movement of the sea feels real, the taste of salt from the sea, the biting of the wind, feel real. It is a masterly achievement. The Great War setting is probably in my thinking here, but it has echoes of that superb espionage novel, The Riddle of The Sands - with the same evocation of charts, channels and the tar, ropes and creaking timber of turn of the century seafaring. Of course, that comparison ends there. Depths has only the skin of a wartime espionage novel like The Riddle of the Sands. It is really about the darkness at the heart of human thought and deed, and the guns of the war only boom away on the horizon, in a different world. 'What war?' asks Sara Fredrika, the woman of the rocks and sea.

Mankell says of this novel that it "takes place in a borderland between reality and my own invention." He is referring to factual details in the novel, and how they are altered to suit the story. But I think he is being more playful than this, and is in some way referring to the whole novel, and not just whether this or that ship is fictitious. There is something unreal about this tale, about Sara Fredrika and her life on the island - a skerry, no more than a rock - or Svartmann's wife Kristina, and her ranks of china figurines. They do not seem like real people, more that they are sort of hyper-imagined, as if there is such a term. Svartmann's descent seems almost incredible, stylised in some way. There is, I think, in the end a quality of nightmare about the whole thing. It seems to lull the reader into literal interpretations, only to dash them aground like a doomed ship. Towards the end, as rumours of his existence spread, folk from surrounding islands say they have heard Svartmann walks on all fours, as if a devil has been born.

In many respects, this intense and compelling novel needs to be read in this way, because reading it as realism would be an impossible, grimmer experience. Characters would make even less sense, their depiction and their roles. Actions would seem more inexplicable. The setting would not seem practical, the movements across it unlikely. But maybe I've got that wrong. Only Mankell would really know if this is a brutal telling of brutal attitudes and deeds, or an extended metaphor on the great distances human intention can travel, from the dread to the good, in a single second, and how easily they can be blown from one course to another.

REVIEW Julius Winsome by Gerard Donovan

2011-05-29T01:05:00.000-07:00

Maine, the white star that burns from November, it rules a cold corner of sky. Here only short sentences and long thoughts can survive: unless you're made of north and given to long spells alone, don't trespass here from then ...

Love, loss and the isolated soul. As a devout fan of the nordic mysteries of Mankell, Theorin and company, Shade Point hugely enjoyed Julius Winsome. It is a story filled with crime, but not a procedural crime thriller in any sense, and the book is as much about the psychological reckoning of killing as it is about its pursuit or resolution. It lives in the sharp clearings of the mind that fight against despair taking hold. Therefore, although not marketed as a crime novel in this country as far as I can see, Julius Winsome would sit very comfortably with writers like those just mentioned, or Jan Costin Wagner, for example. There is a great deal of Cormac McCarthy to this story too, particularly those eerie mountain novels that stick around in your head for months after you've read them. If they haven't already, the Coen Brothers should read Julius Winsome. They would have the eye I think to take this dark, deeply compelling piece of backwoods mountain noir and make it into an absolutely superb film.

Julius Winsome lives on his own in a cabin in the Maine woods. He is fifty one, and has known no other home. His father has died, leaving him the cabin, thousands of books, an Enfield rifle and an emotional inheritance of two World Wars. When required, Julius has the vocabulary of Shakespeare's England to describe the invisible world he lives in. He seems to have managed this existence reasonably well until the arrival of Claire. Or, more correctly, until the leaving of Claire. Like a figure from folktales, she simply emerges from the woods one day. She hails from the nearest town, but this nearest town is far to travel and inhospitably so, and the simple act of her turning up seems slightly unreal, magical. She strikes up a relationship with this abandoned soul Winsome and together they even get a dog to keep him company, which they name Hobbes, and for a short time there is a new light in the dark cabin. And then, as soon as she has arrived it seems, Claire is gone. Julius is plunged back into invisibility, his heart aching, but back into the comfort of routine, and with Hobbes, a new togetherness to carry on with - to somehow assuage the grief he feels at her leaving.

That is, of course, until someone shoots and kills Hobbes. What happens next, I'll leave you to watch through your own fingers in dismay.

The two great triumphs of this book are the narration, by Julius himself, and the evocation of the Maine wilderness. As we get to know Julius, the more complex he becomes, and yet at the same time, the more innocent. Maine, particularly as winter feeds in, changes from a place of wild flowers and trips to the town for coffee, to impassable snow and dread darkness, hunters in the woods, and in Julius Winsome, blood and terror. Somewhat like Lieutenant Glahn in Knut Hamsun's masterpiece Pan, Julius begins to hunt himself in some way, to unravel before our eyes. The dead Hobbes, buried under the snow by the cabin, continues to live fiercely in Julius, like some kind of dark beacon dragging him further and further out. The symbols and markers of Winsome's life are not those of the 'real' world, and when one existence spills over into the other, when loss becomes unbearable, there is big trouble.

This short, dark, menacing book deserves to be much better known. It is written with a poet's eye for detail, and a hugely successful imagining of the interior landscape of Julius Winsome's psychology, as well as the alternately idyllic and hostile woodlands. It renders perfectly the seemingly indefatigable freshness of loss of love, such that with each new day it seems no more distant than the day it occurred, and no more understandable. When it comes, the action is unflinching, terrible and violent, and this steadily more ominous story has both the drive of a strong thriller, and the unrelenting investigation into the burdens of being human of those Scandinavian stories I mentioned at the beginning of this review, whose characters and settings are themselves 'made of north'. Here is a book for the dark places, the dark woods, and for what happens when the darkness bursts out from them, inchoate and despairing, to live for a brief time in the light.

The absence of someone comes like a new season, first only in pieces: you see the absence of them long before they leave ...

REVIEW The Troubled Man by Henning Mankell

2011-05-22T01:19:00.000-07:00

Fear came in waves. When he finally fell asleep, his heart was full of sorrow at the thought that so much of his life was now over and could never be relived.

The bleak midwinter has come to Ystad. According to Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man is Kurt Wallander's last waltz, and it certainly feels like it. From the whiteout isolation of the cover to the valedictory time-gentlemen-please of a finale, it is a novel pre-occupied with ageing, death, disease, isolation, regret and failure. Oh, and guilt. That it also happens to be about family, love and duty is the measure of hope that springs from these chilly pages. It is the underlying appeal, I think, of the entire series: the simple human tenderness of its cast, particularly the hero, in the face of all the murder, despair and chaos.

For those of us who have followed the Wallander Saga from Faceless Killers, joy at the arrival of another book in the series is soon tempered by sadness at the state he is in - his diabetes is on the way to crippling him, a heart episode scares him witless and he suffers desperate dark fugues where his memory fades agonisingly away for panicked stretches. It is as if he is disintegrating before our eyes. In one scene, he is interviewing a lead, and one of his fillings falls out. He seems dumbfounded, bewildered, and is even beaten up by thugs while wandering around the town in the dark. His thoughts turn increasingly to his own brand of existentialist despair and at one point we find him in his attic, lamenting over old vinyl LPs he will never play again. Drunk, he leaves his police handgun in a restaurant. All this would be bad enough, but the police career that sustains him is almost at an end (he is 60), and he is now at odds with the world around him through the simple passing of time and diminishing physical and mental capacity as much as he ever was through the combative iconoclasm of his youthful self. It is a bit like watching a much adored relative stumbling beaten and depressed into the good night. And Martinsson is even a grandfather now for Pete's sake! Time has moved on in Ystad.

The light in Wallander's life is his own new granddaughter, Klara. Linda Wallander is now engaged, and together with her partner Hans, lives in considerable comfort with the baby girl that has fired up in Kurt some last vestiges of hope and happiness. They live in considerable comfort because Hans is a sort of merchant bank type who makes lots of money, but he is also the son of Håkan von Enke, retired naval officer and your basic Swedish gentry. It is Håkan's sudden disappearance, followed quickly by that of his wife, Louise, that Wallander investigates in The Troubled Man. That he does this outside his own working time with Ystad police, crossing the boundaries of his role as a police officer with scant regard for his own personal wellbeing, will surprise no fan of the series. It's a grand old plot Wallander finds himself dealing with - a Swedish Alec Leamas amidst Cold War submarines, American and East German spies, and mysterious islands. It really is a bit like a Le Carré style Iron Curtain thriller.

Except, and this might infuriate Mankell considering the important messages about modern Sweden in all this, for a lot of readers the social message will be secondary in importance to the stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening that is Wallander's own path through the novel. Without giving too much away, there is much revisiting that happens, of places real and imaginary, of people - often in quite heartbreaking ways. Wallander might struggle with some of the loose ends of the giant submarine espionage thriller episode he's submerged in, but there is a path to resolution and drawing together that happens in his own life that is actually the main arc. It is very often an incredibly moving journey.

Some critics have been incredibly unkind to this novel. In a way this was to be expected. The ending of a series as hugely popular and influential as this is more than just another publication - it is an event. Events have different rules, and so there's a sort of open season. Much has been made, for example, of how tired Mankell might be of Wallander, how pitiful and self centred Wallander seems as he struggles across the pages of this big story. For me, though, this last novel is completely in keeping with the stories gone before, completely at one with the direction Wallander was heading, and unflinching about how his powers must fade. He is a normal, mortal man, and this is a novel about a normal, mortal man who is closer to the end than he is to those youthful years when all is strongest. The sense of loss, of regret, is completely human in the context of the life this man has led. It's not a novel to be judged in isolation, this is the end point of a shared adventure of many years.

The Wallander novels have always been character studies of the highest order, books about what it is like to be human, who we are in the moments when we are frail. This beautiful last in the series is simply the most fragile of them all. If you haven't read any Wallander before, don't read this one first. If you have, particularly if you've read the whole series thus far, like Wallander - get the vodka in. You'll need it. The Troubled Man is Kurt's Winterreise and it's emotional hard travelling to follow the old fellow in such deep, deep snow.

Who is the troubled man? We all are.

REVIEW Plugged by Eoin Colfer

2011-05-14T22:32:00.000-07:00

The attitude of The Commitments meets the pace of Get Shorty in Eoin Colfer's new crime thriller for grown-ups, Plugged.

The novel is about Dan McEvoy, an Irish ex-soldier, who has certainly been around a bit, and is now washed up in a New Jersey dive of a casino called Slotz. One of the nightclub hostesses is murdered, one of his 'aquaintances' disappears, and McEvoy finds himself in a race against time, bullets, mobsters and crooked cops, baldness and walk-in freezers to pacify the whole lot. On the way, there are shoot outs, dog throws, barrels of steroids, combat flashbacks aplenty and mucho wise cracking. The reference points, I suppose, are Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler - the hard-boiled, laconic, guy-walks-into-a-room-with-a-gun kind of stuff ...

I think I'm on fairly safe territory in saying that I'm sure Colfer intends the book as pure escapism. It's undoubtedly the level at which the novel works best. If anyone takes it too seriously, or even wants to compare it too closely with Chandler (who has a lot more going on than he is often credited for), then there is going to be disappointment. I enjoyed the book a lot, and read it really quickly because it careens along at great speed and keeps you hooked, but I can't claim it to be as meaningful as some novels by other writers I've reviewed on the site of late - Fred Vargas, for example, or Andrew Taylor. But you know, it's just not meant to be, I think, it's basically meant to be fun - and I should just nail a fifth of Jameson's and fuggedaboutit.

If you're looking for action, for example, it deals it out in spades. There's an almost helter skelter run of mad set pieces - McEvoy is bundled from one do or die situation to another with barely a pause to load a gun or kiss a broad. There's one fight sequence in a car that's jaw-droppingly well put together. It is also occasionally very funny, and in a steadily riffing character device where McEvoy's missing friend carries out an imaginary conversation with our anti-hero, there is almost a self-referential knowing wink from the author to himself as the narrative deadpans on. Occasionally, through McEvoy, Colfer even brings himself up directly for how outlandish it's all getting, how unlikely the escapes, how corny some of the wise-cracks are becoming. If you don't take this novel too seriously, and you like all action, modern-boiled noir, with just a twist of the Dublin swagger of some of the characters in Roddy Doyle's early trilogy, this book is definitely for you.

I have to say though, even taking into account the escapist, fun heart of the book, for me the wise-assery got a bit exhausting, and I felt fairly wised-out by the end. Some of the asides just don't work, to be blunt. I think even Colfer is aware of this, and you can see him trying to temper it with the friend-conversation device I mentioned before. Indeed, there's an almost apologetic air about it at times, a sort of "look no hands" approach that actually ends up serving the book well. The problem of course, is that it's difficult to stay entirely immersed in a character endlessly smart-arsing away to this extent, because the comedy, and the occasionally unintended lack of it, diminishes the threat. There is a bit of that breaking of the fourth wall going on. The minute there feels like no threat in the midst of a hail of bullets, something is just not quite working in terms of creating a sense of menace and unpredictability. It's noir of a kind this book, but not the kind where the darkness is all pervading, seeping into the daylight like blood into water. Jim Thompson, for example. But as I say, this just isn't meant to be the deal.

I hope there's a series here because Plugged is a rattling good read, and there's real potential in McEvoy and his array of wacky chums and even wackier enemies to go forward. Colfer does pace and movement very well, and the violent set pieces (not to mention a Casino Royale style mother-of-all-card-games) are tense and well handled. It is highly visual, and would also make a great film. Right at the minute, Plugged and McEvoy make for a balancing act between a traditional noir mystery and black comedy screwball crime caper. Depending on what kind of reader you are, you may want one of these more than the other. The trick for Colfer if there are future McEvoy books may be the balancing of this.

One thing that struck me - if the Ian Fleming estate are ever looking for an author to write a Bond novel in the spirit of the Roger Moore films (the first great ones, like Live and Let Die, and not the last few parodies) they should give Eoin Colfer a call.

REVIEW An Uncertain Place by Fred Vargas

2011-05-07T23:24:00.000-07:00

The complex threads of other people's lives did not escape the notice of Adamsberg, even if those threads were whispers, minute sensations, puffs of air...

And so, Shade Point's giddy romance with the Adamsberg novels of Fred Vargas continues. Hot on the heels of discovering Vargas for the first time with Have Mercy On Us All (see here for the review) and thanks to those very kind people at RandomPR, here we are with An Uncertain Place.

Vampires this time. Cloud-shoveller and all round wonder Commissionaire Adamsberg is investigating vampires. Not that you'd know it to begin with. First he's abroad in London to discover an array of old shoes filled with severed feet in the gloom of Highgate Cemetery. Then, in Paris, he's called to an apartment where a man has been obliterated, bludgeoned missing through the services of miscellaneous sharp, blunt and powered devices. And the use of an anvil, probably. There is a great big trace of the victim all over the flat, of course, but for all purposes he has been disappeared to a pulp. Within these first forty or so pages of the book, a complete storytelling tour de force, the reader is flung headlong into the surreal, magical world of Adamsberg once again. To Shade Point's considerable glee, An Uncertain Place, and this seems scarcely possible, is an even better book than Have Mercy On Us All.

Adamsberg is to a large degree the key to the series' success. What Fred Vargas has done with Adamsberg is create a genuine literary hero, a unique, stand-out individual that while he may have some aspects of other famous creations in his make up, emerges as his own man - his own, muddled, brilliant, confusing, ingenious man. He gets under the skin because he is fascinating, because his traits are so consistently fed into the whole novel, for the admiration he gets from some of his equally out-there colleagues, for his total unpredictability. The broader success comes from the people and the attitudes that surround Adamsberg, the Paris that is at once the real Paris, but is yet again some kind of dream version of the city. Shade Point is moved towards a great tenderness for Adamsberg and his sidekick Danglard, and only two books into a series, for an imaginary world so beautifully achieved and generously loaned to the reader that it's a relief to stop out of the real one and just go spend time there.

If you want your crime novels to be rigid procedurals, forensically driven and rooted completely in harsh reality, Vargas might fly off into the woods a bit, into the clouds, out to sea. It's a bit like Garcia Marquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude really - in that some people loved that book, but others just couldn't get their tastebuds around the fairy tale of it, the wild unexpectedness of events. She even reminds me a bit of Knut Hamsun, and his early wild creations such as Hunger, Pan or Mysteries. The Adamsberg novels are a sensation and prove with all the bells of Notre Dame on that genre fiction can be as abundantly important if not more so than any Man Booker shortlist out there.

As with Have Mercy On Us All, there is action, eeriness aplenty, and that simply magical mining into the more eccentric, bizarre folkloric stories of the past. There is always an overlay of the past in the two stories I've read, or perhaps more accurately, the past is always threaded into the present. Shade Point faces a bit of a challenge now - not to read the rest of the series in some mad blitz, like opening a bottle of wine and chucking away the lid for one glass after the other like the all-knowing and glugging Danglard. It will be desperately hard to avoid this, then Shade Point will be left in a state of perplexed longing for the next one in the series, re-reading one or two and finding new layers of enjoyment, but bereft. Plog, indeed, as someone might say in An Uncertain Place.

An Interview with Siân Reynolds

Shade Point was delighted to catch up with the translator of An Uncertain Place, Siân Reynolds, to ask her a few questions about Fred Vargas and her novels ...

There is a very eerie quality to the Adamsberg novels. They manage to unsettle in very subtle ways, without ever resorting to the shock and horror tactics of many other modern crime writers – even though there are some very grotesque moments. As translator, where you must read the text quite intensively, does working among all this eeriness ever unnerve you a bit?

I am not really disturbed by Fred’s books, because the eerieness comes from her background as a medievalist. Like you say, ‘grotesque’ is a good description sometimes. For instance in Have Mercy On Us All (David Bellos’s translation) she is drawing on ancient fears of plague. Several of her recent books have serial killers who have something medieval/wizard-like about them. This last one (An Uncertain Place) dips into vampire fantasy of course, but it isn’t fantasy-lit, more a modern take on it.

One of the things I love about the Adamsberg novels is the incorporation of folkloric, historical elements ...

You can read them if you like as medieval romances, dressed up as police procedurals. Although there’s a surface realism about her police force, it’s not much like any actual unit of the Paris police (the TV series Spiral may be nearer the truth, alas). In An Uncertain Place, there is some corruption in the squad, but it’s explained, not endemic. Adamsberg himself has rather magical qualities - he’s not Sherlock Holmes, working by deduction, and he’s not easy to characterise. He gets sudden memories or flashes of intuition/association which lead somewhere. I think he is more like a medieval knight, journeying through the forests on a quest to beat evil, and he’s gradually acquired various magical creatures or people who help him - his lieutenant Violette Retancourt, a woman with superhuman strength and powers of endurance; his page-boy, Estalere; or his (to my mind more lovable) sidekick Danglard, with the encyclopedic memory and bottles of white wine, etc. There’s actually a magical cat in one book. The supporting cast usually has something special about it, and is always drawn in at key moments. Even Adamsberg’s on-off girl-friend Camille is a bit like la belle dame sans merci - she disappears just when he catches up with her (or else he goes off on an adventure and leaves her).

You have translated a number of the Adamsberg novels now – can I ask you if you have a particular favourite?

The first Vargas novel I read was The Chalk Circle Man. One reason it’s still my favourite is that there was a good central role for a middle-aged woman and a general reversal of expectations. I like novels which do not make women archetypal murder victims for no good reason. There’s another of her books (Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand) with a pair of fantastic old women in it, one of whom is an ace computer hacker.

Crime writing, and now particularly in translation, Vargas, Mankell, etc, is a hugely popular genre. Do you have any book recommendations for Shade Point?

I see from your website that you concentrate on mystery/gothic crime. Most of my favourites aren’t really in that area, but I like well-written books from whatever country: Raymond Chandler, Dashiel Hammett, Elmore Leonard, Robert Parker, Henning Mankell, Jean-Patrick Manchette. Donna Leon for Venice and Ian Rankin for Edinburgh tick the boxes too. I’ve just finished translating a prize-winning book by a young French crime writer, called Antonin Varenne: this is grimmer stuff, more political, more upsetting,

As a final question, do you feel that translators get enough credit? I can’t read French, so wouldn’t have access to Fred Vargas without the work you do, and don’t for a minute think it can be a purely academic and non-creative process ...

Ask any translator and they will always say translators don’t get enough credit! Or pay. But most of us do it because we love it - certainly I do. It’s a challenge. Dialogue and tone are always hard to get. Tricky things are slang, swearing, youth-stuff, because they all date, and don’t always map well on to English. Fred writes well and it’s a pleasure to translate. She has this policeman called Veyrenc who speaks in alexandrines - 12-syllable classical French verse. He does this just a little in this book but much more in This Night’s Foul Work. That’s hard!

Siân Reynolds has been awarded the Crime Writers’ Association International Dagger for the best translated book three times for her work on the Adamsberg series: for The Three Evangelists in 2006 , Wash This Blood Clean From My Hand in 2007, and The Chalk Circle Man in 2009.

REVIEW Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen

2011-04-25T01:29:00.000-07:00

Eventually, Shade Point will get sent a Scandinavian crime novel that isn't any good. It has to happen. So far, though, it's beginning to look like there's a secret installation in the hills outside Bergen or someplace, where scientists and literature specialists from all over Scandinavia build and refine the perfect crime novel template before handing it to writer operatives to take over the world. The constant flow of great writing has to dry up. Someday. Surely.

Well, not today. Mercy by Jussi Adler-Olsen is a mighty old thriller. No wonder Lars Von Trier's production company has snapped up the film rights to Adler-Olsen's Department Q series, of which Mercy is the first. There is something at once big and cinematic about the book, and then something refined and human at the same time. It has the screen potential to be laden with action, fighting, and terror - while staring out at the audience from the point of view of ordinary people, ordinary lives and hopes and dreams dashed. It is something of this concentration on the interior isolation and yearning of characters, allied to the very best in edge of the seat storytelling, that is perhaps at least some part of that template from the Bergen hills. A lazy comparison to make because of the Danish connection, but if you liked The Killing, there's a real chance you'll like this book, and there's a real chance a book like this could be adapted for the screen with the same power.

(Anti) Hero of Mercy Carl Morck is very much the troubled loner with the interior life of ice and blood that so characterises many Scandinavian thriller leads. To Shade Point, at least, he is very like Wallander. He has much of that detective's sense of human loss, regret and to an extent bitterness towards a world that is passing him by. There is something of the Western hero in characters like these, such walking anachronisms in the face of new national identities, new cultural dimensions and changing times. Morck and Wallander are really, in many ways, very similar to Sheriff Ed Tom Bell in No Country for Old Men. Something of Cormac McCarthy's elegies to characters wrestling with oblivion is present in these Scandinavian heroes. In Morck there is also, like Leif GW Persson's Johannson, a hint of Le Carre or Greene's burnt out cases - isolated operatives who toil on the edge of, well, just about everything.

Morck is particularly troubled because he emerges at the beginning of the novel as a survivor against the odds - he has been a gasp from death in an incident where one of his colleagues is killed and the other is paralysed for life. The bullet that hits Morck may as well have killed him, he might think, because an already erratic and anti-authoritarian world view is simply maxed out after this trauma. So much so, that in what they perceive as an ingenious move, his colleagues and superiors decide to take advantage of a political zeal for unsolved old cases to bump Morck upstairs - making him the commander of Department Q, a one man band operation to look into cold mysteries. They only give him part of the funding of course, and with comedic irony, actually stick him in the basement.

Morck may be on the verge of burn out, but he's no fool, and readers will discover how he increases his resources, and inherits his assistant Assad, a man who is not who he seems to be at all. Along with a wider field of characters, including his hospitalised colleague Hardy, the future team of Department Q is starting to take shape. There is quite a bit of sly comedy to the process, and the whole thing is really enjoyable. There is a sense of a cast being assembled, a Magnificent 7 gradually being put together by the world weary Morck.

Fate, which I think is another preoccupation of the white coats in the Bergen bunker, plays a huge part in the course of this novel. Deliberately so, and chillingly so. Amidst the setting up of Department Q, which the iconoclast Morck is in no hurry to exactly turn into work, the processing of old cases from upstairs to downstairs to the Q basement is desperately slow. Even then, Morck is entirely random about his approach to these missing persons and unsolved murder files. It actually takes Assad to prompt some greater interest in them, and even then a fair number of chapters have actually gone by before Morck deigns to read a case file. As we are soon to learn, however, this process takes place against the clock of life and death. When Morck and Assad plump for one of the cases to pursue, they could not have left it a minute later. In this randomness, this choice, there comes a keen awareness of the fragility of the balance of life and death. Morck could have just as easily gone for a different folder.

The first case is that of Merete Lynggaard, a politician who vanished 5 years before the start of the novel. She is presumed to have jumped or fallen from a ferry. Her story, however, is much more complicated, and soon Morck and Assad are in a race against time to find out what happened to her. Without giving too much away, this is where the terror comes in. Merete's fate is appalling and the stuff of sleepless nights and haunted days. Morck and Assad simply must succeed. Towards the end the reader is willing them to prevail. I read one review where the reviewer confessed to actually stopping a bit through to read the last couple of pages. I can completely sympathise with this, the tension gets unbearable (which in my case led to a marathon reading session one sleepless night) but try to hang on. The sheer emotional weight of the ending needs the reader in the dark.

Mercy is a great book. The series is perfectly poised to be massively entertaining. There isn't of course a secret installation anywhere, there are just very good writers from Scandinavia, always have been, and perhaps they spring from a different expectation of the nature of thriller writing. Adler-Olsen tells a cracking, hugely exciting and compelling story, but he also describes people and moments that speak very keenly to the reader about life, fate and meaning. Perhaps this is the secret, and crime fiction from other places has become all about shock and forensic procedure; these successful Scandinavian writers are storytellers, and they are as concerned to create depth in characterisation as they are page turning thrills and (blood) spills. Morck could just as easily inhabit the pages of a non-crime novel. Like Wallander, I would read about him starting a salmon farm.

REVIEW The Map of Time by Felix Palma

2011-04-21T02:39:00.000-07:00

The Map of Time. El mapa del tiempo. Le carte du temps. Die Landkarte der Zeit. This feels like one of those massive international 'moments' for genre fiction - like The Name of the Rose and mystery maybe - when a novel has the potential to be read so widely and discussed so fully that in the end it will be hard to escape the buzz - whatever you make of it, and whether it really is genre fiction, or not. By the time it is released in this country, it will already have been published in twenty languages. Compared in advance word to Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, The Time Traveller's Wife and The Shadow of the Wind it is something of a sensation in the making. The knock on effects for speculative fiction may be extremely beneficial to the genre.

Part of the reason for this might be the sheer scale and almost madcap ambition of the book. At times I put it down in amazement, really, and marvelled at the complete nerve of Palma in telling this tale the way he does - so unfashionably escapist, romantic, self-effacing and charming that it is, yet complex and ingenious. It is a novel completely unafraid to sideline apparently central narratives, leap wildly about in terms of what is 'real' within the novel and what is not, and manipulate historical accuracy with gleeful abandon. It is filled with action, romance, philosophy and head bothering time paradox. It is a total delight.

Roughly speaking the novel is about HG Wells, and how he becomes involved in a network of separate time narratives - his own life, the story of a distraught lover whose life is destroyed by Jack the Ripper, the cross-century romance of Claire Haggerty and the dashing Captain Derek Shackleton, and the year 2000's War of the Automatons. Into these strands drift a wild cast of real and imaginary figures - Bram Stoker, for example, Joseph Merrick and Henry James. Conan Doyle appears by association from time to time, gently and knowingly mocked for his more fantastic leanings.

There are just so many inventive little nods to the fictional genres the story inhabits - there is a character in the fictional Wells's world called Jeff Wayne, for example, automatons have become so powerful at one point they threaten humanity like some steampunk Terminator story, and a time traveller who has gone back in time to influence the past is even called Rhys (Reese??). Brilliant, too, is the magical little storyline Palma weaves about the physical time machine Wells keeps in his attic! There will be many more of these superb asides in the book I have missed - to the extent that it will need to be read at least twice to pick them all up. The whole thing is relayed by the ultimate in omniscient narrators - slightly arch, roguish, sentimental. It's a device that can crash and burn, but not here.

And the plot construction is like a Rubik's Cube, where every time you turn your back on it, someone switches one of the little colour squares. It's a cliche to say that nothing is as it seems, but with The Map of Time, that's how it is. Sometimes you spot it, sometimes you don't. Sometimes the reveals are so audacious you just feel like laughing out loud with the nerve of it all. The question of whether anything is any less real while it is engaged with only in the imagination, Palma engages head on. What is the imagination? What is in there?

Some critics may weigh in heavily on some of these plot feints and devices, but they'll be missing the glorious saturday morning serial wonder of it all I think. It's such an ambitious novel, it'll just be one of those books where everything you read about it might indeed be true, and you'll have to read it yourself to see where you stand. It has the potential to be a The Da Vinci Code for 2011, for that reason. But it is a much, much better book.

HG Wells

Categorising the novel is as challenging as following the sleight of hand of the plot - yes, it is a time travelling mystery, but in some senses it is a romantic novel. It is also a science fiction novel, even a steampunk novel, and it is a novel about HG Wells. It is a novel about time, and a novel about human choices and the paths taken or not. At times it is refreshingly sentimental and loving, and at others a true adventure story. This breadth of appeal has the capacity to make The Map of Time a world bestseller, a great screenplay, a great Darren Aranofsky movie and so on.

For Shade Point, it was always going to be a home banker, mind you. I'm a huge fan of HG Wells, stories about time travel, Victoriana, and so on. Like The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen this mad alternative fact/fiction world was never going to miss. I mentioned quite a few books at the opening of this review, and the comparisons to those are clear, but as a guide the book it reminds me of most - in terms of the atmosphere, the 'feel' of it - is Mark Frost's wonderful The List of Seven, a novel that deserves much more attention than it actually gets. In fact, so fond is my memory of Frost's book, and so often do I reference it, that I really must read it again for this site - just to check that it is as good as I remember! Due to the HG Wells/Jack the Ripper element, there may also be comparisons made with Time After Time, which is a fun piece of time travelling hokum I have a bit of a soft spot for!

The List of Seven might be my only cautionary note - it's incredible to me that this novel has faded as it has. It shows the fine line between success and relative obscurity that The Map of Time spins on - but this only succeeds in reflecting one of the key themes of the novel itself. Aranofsky is worth coming back to here, because I loved the time bending The Fountain, but it somehow wasn't a big success - there can be no telling, and Palma's Wells agonises almost constantly on this danger, this weight. The fictional and the real Wells need not worry - Palma very persuasively argues the case for HG Wells as one of the most significant writers ever, and that he certainly is. The sheer level of growing international phenomenon around The Map of Time, regardless of the UK reception, will make sure Palma is okay on that score himself, I hope.

Enjoyable romp though it is, I don't want to leave The Map of Time in bestseller land, in case I've just conveyed a sense of it as only escapist flim-flam. It is and it isn't. It does have an innocent delight in magical storytelling, and has great fun playing with the reader, there are robots and fighting, but it also carries a significant emotional impact - a bit like Graham Joyce's brilliant The Silent Land which I reviewed last month. As I said, it makes us think about the choices we make, the people we love, and the fleeting nature of time. It is about artistic achievement and what makes great art transcend time, and the art of writing itself, how it can capture or save time and memory in the making and telling. It considers the very human desire for something of us to remain, to sustain, and how indeed this might be achieved - by the imagination, perhaps, by love? I found the ending of The Map of Time quite profoundly moving, and put it down with the sense that I had read a really wonderful book. 500 pages flew by in an instant, as if viewed from the upholstered cockpit of the Time Machine imagined by that amazing Mr Wells.

&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;br&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;

REVIEW A Dark Anatomy by Robin Blake

2011-04-15T12:04:00.000-07:00

"I find that puzzles are either canine or feline. Some are like a dog that barks and wants to play. The dog runs and leaps around, just out of reach, but you can be confident that, sooner rather than later, it will tire and be mastered. Much worse are the problems that retreat from you, like a cat that creeps under your garden shed. No amount of cajoling will bring it to hand ..."

Robin Blake's A Dark Anatomy is a superior historical crime mystery. It wears its period detail and research easily, and remembers to tell an engaging story first and foremost, and build on the layers of the past as an assist to that process, rather than a barrier. All that sounds obvious, I suppose, but for every C.J. Sansom - who achieves this too - there are many historical novels that do not strike this balance. It is high praise, but I think comparisons between Blake and Sansom are worthy.

Blake's era is 1740. A Dark Anatomy - the first in a series - tells the story of Coroner Titus Cragg's investigation into the death of the wife of the local squire, Dolores Brockletower of Garlick Hall in Preston. He is ably assisted by his doctor friend, Luke Fidelis. While this sounds quite modern in some senses - a coroner and a doctor and the procedural process this implies - A Dark Anatomy takes place on the brink of modern policing and detection, on the cusp of a clearer legal process for murder investigation. On the edge, therefore, but not quite there. This means Cragg and Fidelis are constantly up against it, that their eighteenth century ideas and sensibilities are sometimes out of step with ours, that the judicial system still seems primitive. But these are strong, resolute characters, and against corruption and interference, we root for them to prevail.

While many things seem completely alien to 21st Century thinking - and one ghoulish scene towards the end epitomises this divide - one of the things that I like about this novel is that Blake has felt no need to be extra barbarous just because he is writing about the past. Some historical novels pile on the thumb screws, the burnings and the plague of boils to a greatly overdone extent, whereas Blake is careful to achieve a balance for his 1740, which makes the whole experience more enjoyable, more immersive. Sure there is violence and gruesome murder, but it is not completely overblown, like some Enlightenment era mystery spoofed by Palin's Ripping Yarns. Cragg and Fidelis are learned, compassionate men of their time - not necessarily out of step with it, merely slightly ahead of the curve. They are very engaging for this and the story is totally compelling.

At which point it is important to say that one of the reasons for this is the confident understanding of his era that Blake shows. When the detail appears, it is expertly woven into the storyline, or the dialogue, so there are very few of those very tell-tale forced source details that haunt other historical novels like Banquo's ghost. Not often, for example, are Fidelis and Cragg worldly wise to the extent that they know every aspect of the era they inhabit, are familiar with every writer, every world event, every idea. They know some, but not all. They have a sense of the world around them, but not everything reaches Preston. They are not bizarrely aware of some piece of information that even 21st Century historians would find esoteric. This, I think, takes considerable skill.

And, it's a rollicking good yarn, filled with intrigue, excitement, and for Cragg, the odd brush with death. The senses work overtime with the richness of the description of inn-cooked chops, toothless poachers, midnight roads, and farting soldiers. When the story moves towards its conclusion, the chase is thrilling and there are twists and turns that are unexpected and great fun. It is a story marked with that deceptively easy storytelling gait of Sansom's Shardlake series, and bodes well for a successful run out for Cragg and Fidelis in books to come.

It may be that the series will take a turn for the darker, and this is often hinted at in A Dark Anatomy - there is talk of werewolves, of possession, the devil walking abroad. This is a different darkness to the "get out the red hot pincers" approach I was lampooning earlier, more that deep undercurrent of superstition and otherworldliness that novels set in the past can achieve - much as that other "anatomy", Andrew Taylor's superb The Anatomy of Ghosts, dwelled on so beautifully. One senses this in Blake's writing, and it will be an impatient wait for the next in the series.

REVIEW Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas

2011-04-14T11:32:00.000-07:00

After a couple of disappointing books that didn't make it on to the site, Shade Point has cracked a seam of gold with Have Mercy on Us All by Fred Vargas.

Having arrived terribly late to this brilliant writer's work - it is amazing how authors pass us by sometimes - it was with a steadily mounting glee that I realised I had stumbled into a new series to follow and cherish. I was pretty sure I was going to enjoy it before turning the first page, mind you - all the Shade Point favourites were there. A touch of gothic? Yes. Old manuscripts and twisted history? Check. Rumpled, eccentric detective? Mais oui. Some novels are just so good it is like the author has written them especially for us, so clearly do they hit the target. Fred Vargas's work is exactly that for me.

Have Mercy on Us All introduced me to Detective Commissaire Adamsberg, a wonderful, eccentric creation, and his instinct-driven investigation into macabre events arising from the appearance of eerie symbols painted on Parisian doorways. Harking back in origin to the days of The Black Death, these ominous signals lead inevitably to grotesque corpses cluttering Paris and plunge Adamsberg into an investigation that takes in all things from a unique means of transporting rat fleas to the intrigues of life as a modern day town crier. Throughout, it has an almost Magic Realist sensibility, and if Adamsberg resembles a quirkier Morse - as suggested on the dustjacket - it is Morse viewed through the kaleidoscope of Garcia Marquez. Actually, it also reminded me a lot of one of the best books I have read - the utterly brilliant The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez Reverte. Like Reverte, Vargas is writing a thriller, but the thriller genre in such hands becomes a vehicle for an intensely intelligent dance across metaphysical boundaries - surreal, magical, spiritual even. Life and death are not separate worlds in Adamsberg's investigation - they speak with each other, across time, across the instincts and desires of the characters.

Highly visual, Paris leaps to life in this book, and filled with a veritable 'cast' of characters (as if Paris has become a circus troupe), the novel builds from a whispery, surreal opening into a tense and fairly chilling unravelling of the plot, the normal order of things, and our perceptions of the way the way the world works. Adamsberg throughout is then an enigmatic presence - comfortable and admirable at times, yet dark and suddenly destructive at others. He follows hunches, feelings, memories and signs. He has one foot in the real world, the other in, well, the "other". His colleagues are exasperated by him and in awe of him in equal measure. The more fantastical the nature of the situation developing before him, the more bizarre the clues, behaviours and atmosphere, the more Adamsberg is actually investigating things that become very much within psychological understanding, and these outlandish trappings conspire in some alchemical way that in the end renders them more realistic, more about actual human emotions and beliefs than events in novels that are actually supposed to be 'real', to be 'gritty' and 'say things as they are' and so on. There is more about human nature in a paragraph of Vargas than an entire book from the increasingly loud and noisy ranks of serial killer novels bending the shelves in your local WH Smith.

I loved the interplay of historical information with the modern-ish day plot development (there is a timelessness about the Vargas procedural), and the occasionally surreal way this combines. There is something deeply eerie about the Plague-era iconography and language carried into Adamsberg's world, and the way Vargas builds the investigation's momentum is thrilling. I like mystery novels that connect to the past - where the weight of the past seems to infiltrate contemporary action and thought. I liked the learning of it, its intelligence and empathy, and the mining of a bygone age to assist in the uncovering of modern truth and moral balance. It created an atmosphere, a miasma of dread and madness across the whole story that was wonderfully done. Not that it is all serious of course: there is a fault-line of black humour up the middle that is hugely enjoyable. But ultimately, this is sincere, important writing.

Overall, I believe Fred Vargas to be downright brilliant, and I love her work.

The House of Silk: The new Sherlock Holmes ...

2011-04-11T11:36:00.000-07:00

I really can't wait for this ...

REVIEW The Business of Dying by Simon Kernick

2011-03-26T02:49:00.000-07:00

And so, with a dodgy shooter in one hand and a pint of Pride in the other, Shade Point's Great Transworld Crime Caper comes to an end in a hail of bullets with Simon Kernick's The Business of Dying. First published in 2002, this is a blunt instrument of a novel to be sure, an all action tale of hard as nails DS Dennis Milne, and his attempts to find the brutal killer of a young girl found as day dawns by the side of a London canal.

What makes The Business of Dying different, however, is that DS Milne also happens to be a killer himself, living a life very much outside the law he is sworn to protect. The smoke has barely cleared from the barrel of his own gun when he is by the side of the grim canal, looking down on the body of the murdered girl. In his introduction to the novel, Kernick talks about how this central contradiction drove the writing of the book, and how Milne's own murderous life suddenly intersects with the case he is investigating: Milne is "both the hunter and the hunted, his two diametrically opposing worlds collide ..."

So, while Milne is investigating the death of the young girl, he is in effect on the run from the forces of the law himself, not to mention outlaw forces increasingly interested in his demise. To say too much about how this happens exactly would be a bit of a spoiler, I think, so I'll leave it at that. It is just enough to know that Milne is a killer, that this is a novel where the central character wrestles with his own guilt, where the balancing point of morality is never clear-fixed. This is driven by the hugely effective first person narrative from Milne's point of view, and what Kernick achieves is a wrestling match for the reader as they find themselves siding with this seemingly amoral anti-hero of his, while being terribly aware that he is a killer, and a killer with a spiralling body count at that.

In this respect, I was reminded of The Talented Mr Ripley. There is something of Ripley's almost comical descent into multiple murder in the way that Milne, albeit for different purpose, falls deeper and deeper into the abyss. There is one scene in particular that describes the fallout from a misfiring pistol that is grotesque, darkly comic - excruciating even. Very like the way Highsmith has the reader almost disorientated with Ripley's endless audacity. Yes, something like a cross between Robinson's Inspector Banks and Tom Ripley and you have some idea of how Milne's story pans out.

Aside from the edge of the seat drama sustained by the ambiguities and conflicts of Milne's dilemma, the novel is successful in many other ways. It is a superb evocation of London, for example, particularly the world of the pubs, the clubs and the grimy backstreets. King's Cross lurches from the page, and the detectives criss cross the city on car, by tube, on foot. There is a really gritty, hard boiled sense of London the city in this book that impressed me a great deal. You could taste the pubs they were so simply but effectively described. It was a novel of thirst for sure - Milne downs Pride, Fosters, unbranded budget lager, wine, brandy, Heineken ... It certainly had the Shade Point fridge stocked. Rather like Regan in The Sweeney, it is hard not to imagine Milne being half-cut almost constantly.

Seriously though, this is a terrific novel, and a great end to the Caper. Any book that has me referencing Ripley - one of my all time favourite novels - is always going to have gone down well. The Business of Dying is a brutal, action packed crime novel, but it is also a brooding Shakespearean affair, where the central character is plunged into a cauldron of right and wrong, good and bad - an acute examination of whether good people can do bad things yet remain good. Or not. Where an eye for an eye is king and the measures of sin are weighed. This penitential heart of the story is very successfully rendered and Milne's desperation for some form of redemption or forgiveness, even when he seems completely deluded and lost, mark the novel as something quite different from many others in the genre, and Kernick as a very fine writer indeed. It is in the end some kind of bullet ridden morality play, running scared and dangerous through the London night - to a place where there is likely to be no solace at all.

REVIEW The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett

2011-03-11T00:58:00.000-08:00

Round Two of the Great Transworld Crime Caper for me, and it's The Chemistry of Death by Simon Beckett. I chose books by authors new to me, and so far it's paid off. Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler I enjoyed immensely, and The Chemistry of Death likewise. Maybe not as much, and in different ways, but I still enjoyed it. One of the great things about the Crime Caper is the way it introduces you to first novels in a series. Yes, it'll do no harm for sales if any Caper Folk get hooked, but it's exciting to read books that might otherwise pass you by.

The Chemistry of Death might have passed me by. It's about a serial killer for a start. As a rule, I don't review books on Shade Point that I just don't particularly like, and I'd have to say that virtually identical serial killer novels are frequently the ones that go astray. There just seems to be a proliferation of very similar novels - where the central character from one writer's book could just as easily leap into the work of another, so samey are the general ideas. They are increasingly outlandish too, with all sorts of Liquorice Allsorts Man, The Nose and Lips Keeper and leaving a piggy bank as a calling card style conceits, that actually, rather than up any ante, have the opposite effect. They are copies, essentially, and very often forget that amidst all this gore and horror, there needs to be some universal point, some human point of connection, that the reader can come away with. Some understanding. Not of killers and motives or the way the edges of a wound say this or that, but some understanding of what the author is trying to say, what it all means. The best crime writing always does this. Some of the serial killer novels around, for all their novelty and ingenuity, are simply slaughterhouses: hell on earth for the sake of hell on earth

The Chemistry of Death, like Belinda Bauer's Darkside which I also reviewed recently, is a level above all this. Yes, it has elements of the formulaic serial killer novel, and yes, the ending has a couple of Silence of the Lambs style feints (a successful device overused), but it is a different proposition. Like Darkside, it is set in a very small, closed rural English village. The claustrophobia of this setting, the paranoia it creates, and the sense of a small space growing ever smaller are all successfully conveyed. Critical to this is the patient building of the environment, so that when the first murder is revealed, for all its outlandishness, it somehow doesn't seem formulaic, but part of a narrative that seems believable. The world of Bones hasn't suddenly been dumped in the English countryside from nowhere, and forced to make sense.

The book is about a forensics expert called David Hunter - a recurring character in following novels in the series - who moves to a tiny village in Norfolk to escape a trauma in his life. His past as a forensics guru of some standing, frequently called upon by Police, he is intent to leave behind. He becomes a GP in close-knit little Manham. Three years later a gruesome murder jolts Hunter from his path, and alongside a detective Mackenzie he is plunged back into his old life.

And really, it works very well. This is in part because of the skill with setting I mentioned before, but it is also to do with Hunter and how his backstory is dealt with as the main narrative drives forward. Through dream sequences, Hunter is in effect communicating with his past, and this gives the novel a supernatural edge that while being quite eerie is also important because it creates that much needed human connection. There may be a serial killer on the loose, but this is still a novel about more than catching a serial killer. It has much to say about love, and loss, and grief, and the mechanisms of coping. The chemistry of living is as much in this book as that of death. Of course, with a forensics expert as a main character, we're often surrounded by maggot trails, and larvae and bones - there is more than enough of that to keep the fans of gore happy - but we are also party to regret, compassion and tenderness. One dream scene in particular, towards the conclusion of the book, was incredibly moving. I'll mention Johan Theorin at the drop of a hat (or even in a review) but there is something of that writer's handling of the strange borderlands between life and death, natural and supernatural, at work in The Chemistry of Death.

The tension is handled very well, and there are some incredibly suspenseful moments. At one point I was reminded a bit of that great PD James novel, Devices and Desires. Both are serial killer novels, and both are set in Norfolk. Beckett also has something of that incredible skill James has for heart in the mouth descriptions of imminent danger. I've slightly hinted that I had one or two problems with the ending, but I won't go into them - they would only be spoilers for what I think is an incredibly assured debut for Simon Beckett's David Hunter, and I suspect the remaining books in the sequence build on this considerably and I now look forward to reading them all.

REVIEW Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End by Leif G W Persson

2011-03-07T08:21:00.000-08:00

Leif Persson's Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is subtitled 'The Story of a Crime.' This is remarkable on two fronts.

Firstly, there is that understated sense of a novel's actual thematic depth that we attach to Graham Greene's subtitling of a novel like Our Man in Havana 'An Entertainment'. To call a novel as complex as Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End a 'story' is akin to calling Picasso's 'Guernica' a 'sketch'. What this does, I think, is ask us to weigh up the place of one single narrative in the midst of hundreds. One voice in the midst of many. What might have had one effect as we look at the cover with no idea of the contents, has a very different effect once we have read it. Whose story is really being told? Who is telling it?

Secondly, there is an ambiguity at work. There is a crime genre convention in that the reader is quickly aware - at the speed of someone falling, in fact - of the mysterious death of an American in Sweden. That there are suspicious circumstances, there is no doubt. But this novel is also, in the end, about the assassination - still unsolved but with a theory posited in this book - of Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme in 1986. If this is the 'crime' in question, in Swedish terms it must be like subtitling a novel about the death of JFK, 'a story of a shooting'. What I think is perhaps intended here is a dialogue about the nature of a single act, against the intentions and schemes of many. What is the weight of it all? Indeed, at one point, I actually began to wonder if the 'crime' in question was some sense of a decay in Swedish society itself since the end of the Second War.

This may be too much preamble, but I think there is merit in discussing it, because it seems to head inwards to the centre of this novel - an occasionally bewildering and vast, but always compelling and increasingly impressive tour de force - because nothing is as it seems, the scales of morality and ethics tip one way, then the next, then hover at the balance. Where in the midst of all this paranoia, manipulation and despair does the true story, the truth itself, lie? Is there indeed, only one crime or criminal? One of the characters dwells in this mire early in the novel:

"He had brooded half the night until he saw himself as if in a mirror that mirrored another mirror diagonally behind his back, multiplying him into infinity ..."

So, rather than Greene, it is John Le Carre that Shade Point was most reminded of when reading this labyrinthine novel of police and political intrigue. I'm thinking particulary of novels like The Russia House, and that general era. In the customary way of this blog - i.e. an enjoyment of sweeping comparisons that is really faintly embarrassing - if you imagine a mash up of John Le Carre and Henning Mankell, then you'll be close to my sense of this book. It may be 'The Story of a Crime' but it is not a formulaic crime novel by any means. Characters may indeed be policemen, or secret policemen, but this is not a traditional procedural. With my mind occasionally bent out of shape by its various twists and turns, I can vouch for it being a different beast altogether. Related certainly, but in the way that a wild wolf is related to a fierce labrador. Sweden is given some kind of camera obscura treatment in this novel, held up to the scrutiny of those endless mirrors, and as a reader I could only do my best to interpret it all. What is important about this, I think, is that Persson makes it important to know, and to that end achieves a quite overwhelming sense of curiosity about Palme's assassination in the reader, a desire to understand, to find out - this reminds me of Stone's JFK. Okay, that film was criticised for lots of reasons, but nothing I've read has convincingly diminished its power to ask questions.

Much has already been said by many about Scandinavian Crime Fiction and the reproductive prowess this literary movement seems to have - from Mankell to Larsson (who I think is just a bit overrated) to Fossum, Jungstedt, Theorin, Nesser et al. There seems to be no loss of momentum. Which is a good thing because the British and American crime fiction scene has been in some ways tiring in recent years, with endless copies of Val McDermid, The Silence of the Lambs, Cornwell, Rebus, etc. These 'nordic noir' authors are all very strong writers. They are something of a relief from the trend in American and British crime fiction to ultra forensic serial killer cliche or simply relocating a successful detective concept to different places and times. Often Scandinavian works are more rooted in reality, in society, in people, than in shock, and therefore are nearly always more shocking because of it.

What seems strange to me is the late coming to the UK of Leif G W Persson, who is obviously a major, major figure in his native Sweden. I'm not really a close student of Scandinavian fiction so this may not be the case at all, but it was certainly the first that I heard of him when I received Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End. Which is odd, as I say, because Persson is no "ordinary" crime writer. He is, for example, Sweden's "most renowned criminologist and leading psychological profiler." He has served as an advisor to the Ministry of Justice, has been a Professor at the National Swedish Police Board. Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End was first published in Sweden in 2002, and is the first part of a trilogy which continued with Another Time, Another Life and Falling Freely, as if in a Dream. Persson's most recent novel, The Dying Detective, was awarded Best Swedish Crime Novel of the Year by the Swedish Academy of Crime Writers. He is described as the Grand Master of Scandinavian Crime Fiction - a title which is as ominous as it is impressive! Added to all this, considering the subject matter of the novel, Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End must have been a huge publication in Sweden, a country which this novel suggests, has still to come to terms with Palme's killing. Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is Persson's only published novel in English, and having read it, this just seems mad.

If you are looking for a simple police procedural, murder, investigation, captured murderer narrative you will have come to the wrong place with this book. That's not to say that elements of that are missing - they're there alright - but they are just one part of a complicated multilayered, multi-narrative enigma code of a novel. What seems like a story with dual narrative strands begins to split, I found, then split again and again, into a babel of voices and viewpoints. At one point towards the end, what seems like an omniscient narrator from on-high steps back, and looks at Sweden since World War Two, as if to focus our minds on the history of it all. But hang on, is this a neutral narrator? Is there any neutrality? Indeed, has Sweden ever been a neutral country? The reader can only read on, and try to take on the full weight of the endless questions. "This country is in the process of completely going to hell," considers a character at one point.

Part of this is the struggle to find a conventional protagonist to pin trust and hope on. Some of the characters in the book are repulsive, their world view horrendous. On a whole load of counts, a whole load of readers are likely to find some offence in what these devils say, or what they do. There is a sort of Life on Mars/Ashes to Ashes effect at work where the sensibilities of different eras clash - but with less knowing humour, and more bullets in the back and brutalised dreams. One suspects Persson would share these feelings, and so subjects some of his characters to withering satire, often using the device of internal thoughts immediately contradicting spoken dialogue. Fans of conventional come-uppance will be disappointed though - there just isn't a convenient way out of it all. When it comes, the description of Palme's murder is devastating.

Lars Martin Johannson, a senior policeman who can "see around corners" is probably the nearest to a Wallander figure in the book. Although any comfort in such comparison is debunked quite thoroughly:

"While he made coffee he hummed an old Sven-Ingvars song, great fan of dance-band music and real policeman that he was , in contrast to those fictional opera lovers who seemed to populate every single made-up police station from Ystad to Haparanda."

Affectionate, perhaps, but maybe not. Who can tell. Who can tell indeed which one of the several 'real' policemen one meets during the novel is actually closest to our ideal. Wallander's personal foibles and failings seem suddenly balanced when compared to this roll call of dysfunction, hubris and corruption. Johansson seems the only one who stands out and certainly when he is the prime focus of the story, some sense of stability is restored. But again, Persson may only be playing with us. But most importantly, if the narrative he puts forward is true, then surely some of this rogues gallery must be based on real people, with real secrets to keep and the capacity to keep them by violence ...

Between Summer's Longing and Winter's End is quite frankly a brave and magnificent book. It can be hard reading, but the rewards of sticking with it are immense. It is not, I suspect, meant to be easy. The novel's appropriation by crime genre marketing, like those of the brilliant Johan Theorin, is to to some extent a bit misleading. By the end, I thought that I was probably reading a bit of a political espionage masterpiece, and that if a novel of similar scale and complexity was written about a historical event of such importance in the UK, it would be the focus of intense publicity and discussion. I hope the rest of Persson's work is published in this country very soon.

The dedication at the beginning of the novel seems to take on a huge resonance once the book has been read, and in many ways turns one of those dark Swedish mirrors on truth itself:

"The best informant is the one who hasn't understood the significance of what he has told"

REVIEW Full Dark House by Christopher Fowler

2011-02-16T11:26:00.000-08:00

They argued about criminal psychology, endlessly revising their conclusions, but sometimes, when the sky was lower and the colours were drained from the Embankment buildings, they talked of women they had loved and lost, of plans made and abandoned, of outlandish ideas and unrealized dreams; often they just walked in comfortable silence, enjoying the lightness of air across the water, letting the sunlight fall on their faces.

For me, Christopher Fowler's 'Down' was the stand-out story in The End of the Line, which I reviewed a few months ago. There was something about that story, its scariness, its emotional pull, its atmosphere, that just resonated with me the most. On the strength of that ghostly gem I chose Fowler's first Bryant & May mystery from the Transworld Crime Caper list.

I didn't know what to expect. I did a bit of background research, and in the end decided I was in for a kind of cross between Ngaio Marsh and The X Files. As it turns out, it was sort of that, but so much more. While Reading Challenges may be good for getting us to read new things - and the Crime Caper has a particularly brilliant focus - in the case of Fowler, this Challenge will be bad for the old bank balance: I now want to read and own the whole Bryant & May series!

In summary, the novel is set alternately between Blitz era and modern day London, and lingers in atmosphere somewhere on the misty lines between the real and the otherworldy. Bryant and May are detectives for the Peculiar Crimes Unit, and they are brought in to investigate an increasingly macabre series of murders in a London theatre. While that sounds straightforward on the surface, the story involves connections with the spirit world, brutal murder, stuffed cats channelling the beyond, Greek tycoons, grotesque phantoms in the black out, and some straight out comedy - almost as if the press office in Scoop was redrawn as a branch of Scotland Yard - and much more. I'm not kidding - this is like diving into a giant vat of all the stuff you love about Conan Doyle, Wells, MR James and so many more fantastic period writers. Full Dark House wears these influences proudly while boldly creating its own unique world. No small trick that.

Frankly, a novel that lives in both the real and the surreal, the supernatural, is always going to be a hit at Shade Point. Shade Point is more firmly in the 'Creeping Man' Sherlock Holmes world, than that of missing plans and jewels. That's a crude outline, but it captures I think a bit of the identity of books that will always be a winner with me. Christopher Fowler's Bryant & May novels look very much as if they may occupy that midnight clanking mistiness as well, and often I was fairly gleeful as Full Dark House piled on the macabre and the mysterious period detail, with a chillingly realised horror sensibility that actually reminded me of James Herbert at times.

But I'm doing this novel a disservice in a way, because it is more than this. Like all the best mystery novels, it is a marvelous evocation of place, London, and a hugely moving depiction of a great friendship, albeit in the early stages in this novel. It is a love affair with London, a place I am in awe of in many ways, and a journey through London's past, often throwing up hugely fascinating little vignettes of life in the city in the Blitz, some of which were complete eye openers and often very moving. I saw a review somewhere describing this London almanac quality as being a bit like Peter Ackroyd. I see that - and love Hawksmoor - but I'd actually go out on a limb and say that maybe Fowler's London is more wonderfully realised. To boot, Bryant and May are superb characters - believeable, and yet not of our world somehow. Holmes and Watson were like that for me too. They occupied a magic space as well as a historical one. Bryant and May, their relationship and their safety just matter, and very soon into the novel too. They are marvelous creations.

As the novel hurtles towards its conclusion it is best to hang on - to your reasoning and expectations. Dead ends are met, implausibilities and unlikely events are piled on top of each other, and disbelief occasionally stretched to the limits. But none of this matters - this is a novel that creates a world with its own rules and likelihoods. It isn't realism. It reminded me of Mark Frost's The List of Seven for some reason - a book I must hunt down and read again. Populated with endless referencing and allusion, Fowler is an incredibly knowledgeable fellow I think, occasionally this lies a bit too thickly over the narrative - but as a first novel in a series a great deal of groundwork has to be done and often I think wild enthusiasm just takes over.

Constantly interested in book covers, I found the cover of this book slightly misleading, and wondered often if this was why I hadn't picked up on this series before. It is a superb illustration, but in a way it doesn't capture the book for me somehow. There is a darkness that is missing somewhere. Something about the macabre aspects of the book are not captured by the Boy's Own Story retro style. The work on the PCU website is more how I see it. There is a lightheartedness in the book, a warmth, I won't deny that, and a square-jawed hero quality, but its not the whole story by any means. I'm really interested to see where the books go as the series progresses.

Hats off then to Mr Christopher Fowler, this is just superb. I raise a hip flask of black market whiskey to Arthur Bryant and John May.

Shade Point joins the Great Transworld Crime Caper!

2011-02-15T07:44:00.000-08:00

Shade Point has joined up to the Great Transworld Crime Caper. Some of the best books I've read recently have come from Transworld, so it was great to be chosen to join the challenge.

Transworld say that the new challenge is "an opportunity to go back to the beginning and revisit the scene of the original crimes that launched our most experienced villains." To this end I chose three writers whose novels are new to me: Christopher Fowler, Simon Beckett and Simon Kernick.

You can click on the Crime Caper banner to find out more.

REVIEW The Silent Land by Graham Joyce

2011-02-10T13:06:00.000-08:00

All was quiet. Everywhere was deserted. There was only the white, white snow of the silent land.

Jake and Zoe, a young, married couple, very much in love, are caught in an avalanche while on a skiing holiday in the French Pyrenees. Once they have hauled themselves from this white tidal wave, they return to their hotel, to the village, and it is deserted, abandoned. Days pass, they try to leave, but every time end up back where they started. Food in the kitchen does not rot, candles do not burn down. Eventually, it becomes obvious that something is amiss. Eventually they realise they are not actually alone at all.

Nothing is amiss, in my view, with this novel. I've read some great books recently, but this one sits very easily with those I have enjoyed the most. There are a number of reasons why this came as a slight surprise. It is a very short book, essentially a two-hander in terms of characterisation, and it does not move from one setting. The ending, I felt, became obvious fairly early. The novel also treads a very familiar path; Jonathan Wright acknowledged this in his SFX review (the review which made me rush out and buy the book, as it happens): "Graham Joyce's latest novel rests upon a familiar horror premise: the idea of being caught betwixt and between in an eerie place where the everyday and the eldritch co-exist." And finally, as another reader pointed out to me, there is some obvious symbolism and metaphor at work.

So, bearing all this in mind, I was delighted to discover that from first page to last, I loved it. I read the whole thing on a train journey from Edinburgh to Devon. Like Jonathan Wright, I felt immensely attached to the characters, I liked them both, and I believed in them. I felt the love they shared seemed entirely real, and not romanticised at all. It is not overstating it one bit to say that if this characterisation hadn't worked, the novel would have collapsed. It is a testament to Joyce's skill as a writer, as an observer, I guess, that Zoe and Jake seemed so real, had that every man/every woman quality that leads the reader to suspend the disbelief and take on board the more fantastic elements of the story without noticing. I've said on this blog quite a few times how I admire Stephen King's ability to capture the humanity of his characters, their dreams, loves and hopes, and Joyce achieves a similar success in this novel. I cared about Zoe and Jake. And like that trick of King's, I cared about Zoe and Jake because they remind me of people I care about, they remind me about caring.

The ice-sharp, brilliant-white strength of feeling that Joyce captures, is of course so intense, because this is a novel about love, yes, but also about its master thief, death. Death, loss, forgiveness. Forgiving yourself, forgiving other people. Living and loving. Hoping. Redemption. Acceptance. I'm a bit stuck to go on from there in detail, though, because I really don't want to spoil this book for anyone who fancies reading it. Obviously, there are spoilers on the book jacket itself, obviously it's not hard reading this review so far to have some sense of what the book is about, but the layers that are encountered have an eerie, wistful, haunted impact that is best enjoyed unprepared I think. Suffice to say, in this new white world, the rules are very different:

"Her love and affection for him, and their mutual dependence in this shadow world, had amplified massively. But there were forces of reversal at work here. If love was a force of gravity, this place had a centrifugal force, dragging at her psyche."

I don't mind at all saying I was greatly moved by this book. I might have cut a desolate figure on the train, opening my can of Strongbow when I'd finished the story, and actually, I have to admit it, fighting back the urge to blub a bit. It is such a gently written, poetic, and tender song of a book this - unpretentious, unafraid of using the commonplace thoughts, feelings and belief motifs of everyday people. By the end, when that end seems to brood like the huge shifting ramparts of snow surrounding Jake and Zoe, the reader may well feel engulfed by an increasing desperation for it to not be this way, for this not to happen, for it not to be true. It is not necessarily a rage against the dying of the light, as a plaintive keening for that light to never diminish. For love to transcend, as it does in 'Remember', the Christina Rossetti poem that opens the story:

"Remember me when I am gone away,
Gone far away into the silent land"

Many of our so-called genre writers, Graham Joyce included I can now see, write such vivid, moving evocations of the human condition I think. This is a fact often woefully overlooked, or pompously condescended to elsewhere. In The Silent Land Joyce has created a beautiful love story that will stay with me a long time, and deserves much wider attention.

REVIEW Cuckoo by Julia Crouch

2011-02-03T05:28:00.000-08:00

I remember a girl so bold and so bright
Loose-limbed and laughing and brazen and bare
Sits gnawing her knuckles in the chemical light
O where do we go now, but nowhere

From 'Where Do We Go Now But Nowhere' by Nick Cave

Beware the ordinary. Beware domestic contentment. Underneath its veneer lies menace - passions thwarted, ambitions destroyed, secrets at ransom. In Julia Crouch's splendid debut novel, Cuckoo, even the simple act of stirring custard happens against a backdrop of dread and mental disintegration. Don't be fooled by the pink suitcase on the cover; instead look to the halo of darkness and the harsh windows beyond. This is a book where the facade of the ordinary splinters, cracks and opens into an abyss. In the novel, the suitcase is just about the only thing that is pink. This novel is Barbara Vine, not Cath Kidston.

The fiendish overlay of psychological unravelling on face-value domesticity is one of the book's strengths. Crouch will intermingle random acts of sex, violence and despair with the map references of the every day, like brandnames, for example - parcels will come from Amazon, candles will be by Jo Malone, bubblebath by Aveda. People make lovely pies, and pasta dishes and bake stuff. Meantime, property will be wrecked, blood spilled, poison administered, and drink-fuelled sex gorged on in harsh moonlight; in bedrooms, parks, studios, cottages and fields. Interested thus far?

Rose and Gareth live in a rural idyll in the West Country. They have two little girls, a renovated farmhouse, an absentee American movie star as one obliging neighbour, a best-selling crime writer as another and the baker in the village used to do cake for Konditor & Cook. It's hard not to imagine Crouch taking an impish glee as she takes a frantic pick axe to all this Boden wonderland with the arrival of ex-rock star Polly - suddenly widowed, with two small boys in tow. Polly's husband, an old friend of Gareth, has died in a car accident. From here on in, Rose's life is plunged first into paranoia and then into headlong disaster.

Polly, the name intentional I think, is a somehow demented shadow of PJ Harvey, and certainly the descriptions of her seem very like her real life doppleganger - although hopefully that's where the similarities end. Fictional Polly is a different kind of force of nature, and throughout the novel, the reader is caught up in the tension of understanding her, gauging the level of her control of events as Rose's life is thrown into one insanity after another. She is wraith-like in some ways, and really, the reader may in the end be baffled by her, unsure of her - just fully unsure. It really does go that mad.

In the press release that accompanied my copy of the book, it says that the novel was inspired by Simone De Beauvoir's She Came To Stay and Nick Cave's The Boatman's Call album. To a Nick Cave fan, this says it all really. Not to mention the fact that Cave now lives in Brighton, a town which has a pivotal part to play in the past and present of the narrative. For some reason - and I'm being lazy here because I haven't read it in twenty years - I felt it reminded me a bit of Fay Weldon's The Life and Loves of a She-devil. There is just something of that macabre interplay between characters that made me see that connection. There is something too, as I said before, of Ruth Rendell in the novel - that clinical observation of passion and obsession smashing up the perfect and the mundane with intense suddeness and terror. The cuckoo that ransacks the nest.

So, Cuckoo is a thriller. Like all thrillers, the reader's final enjoyment will depend to a large degree on being satisfied by the ending. As with all novels where the reader juggles at least three possible outcomes throughout, there will be the chance that that the eventual outcome isn't as expected, for good or for bad. To some extent, the ending wasn't the one I anticipated - but this isn't really a criticism. It just wasn't the ending I wanted, and that's a different thing. Can't say more, without loading up on spoilers, so you'll just have to read the book! What I'm hinting at, is that the novel probably tests our own sense of the idyllic, and what a 'happy ending' really is, really ...

Cuckoo is just one of those novels that plays with the reader, just as much as Polly holds up a cracked mirror to the sublime life that Rose has created. Her arrival is like a spider being crushed, a ladder walked under - she breaks the magical thinking spell we all try to throw over the life and the people we love. In that respect, it is as much a fevered imagining of all the terrible things that can happen, how little control we have over them, as it is a conventional thriller. Polly represents chaos, fear, danger, risk, loss, hurt, harm. In part because she is all these things, but also because she reflects and uncovers it in other people. Particularly Rose, maybe the reader too. Polly is the herald of 'harm's way'.

It's well worth some time in the nest, Cuckoo, just hold on tight ...

REVIEW The Guardians by Andrew Pyper

2011-01-21T23:13:00.000-08:00

Andrew Pyper's The Guardians is superbly creepy and I enjoyed it a very great deal. It is a tale of small town horror in the Stephen King/Peter Straub tradition, and sits quite comfortably in that comparison. Pyper is a very strong writer, and like those two giants of the genre, he has the ability to blend the spine chilling with a sympathetic understanding of small communities, and the hopes, dreams and fears of their inhabitants. The novel picks up a strong pace from the very first page, and within only a few chapters has become a complete page-turner.

Returning to his hometown of Grimshaw for the funeral of a school friend, ex-nightclub owner Trevor is plunged into the dark chambers of the past. Nothing represents this journey more than the malevolent, brooding presence of the Thurman House on Caledonia Street, empty and decaying for decades. It is a place of terrible memory for Trevor and his friends, and a house, it seems, his late friend Ben has kept under surveillance for twenty years ...

One of the successes of The Guardians is the evocation of place, not just the spooky Thurman House - which is vividly realised - but the small town of Grimshaw itself. Although there is a Grimshaw in Pyper's native Canada, I read a great online interview with the author where he states that he based his fictional small town on his own hometown of Stratford, Ontario. Grimshaw wakes brilliantly to life - the surreal Old London Steakhouse, Jake's Pool 'n' Sports and the aluminium-clad house of Trevor's school sweetheart, Sarah. It is tempting to imagine these being real places from Pyper's own youth. Like the fictionalised Grimshaw, Stratford even has its own Caledonia Street. Does it have its own Thurman House?

View Larger Map

The Guardians, I think, posits that all small towns have a Thurman House. In fact, it's probably reasonable to suggest that Pyper is placing the Thurman House on two levels. The first, obviously, as a doomed house with a terrible past. The second, as a symbol in a rumination on the way people carry aspects of their past with them, throughout life, just like the scary old house everyone ran past as kids - something to confront, or run from forever.

The sense of dread that builds as Trevor moves towards his own confrontation with the Thurman House, is achieved by alternating between the present day narrative, and a dictaphone-driven 'Memory Diary' Trevor has been creating since his diagnosis with Parkinson's Disease. This dual narrative is cleverer than it first appears, because it is not just a means of telling the back story while keeping the main story driving along. I think it is meant to emphasise the way in which Trevor and his past will always operate in tandem, each informing the other in constant loops. This is further suggested by the way in which the two narratives bleed across each other, and the adult Trevor and schoolkid Trevor become in moments difficult to separate. In large part this may be because the book is also about growing old, about the reckoning of the bar bill, about the dashing of hopes and the reconciliation of childhood hopes with adult realities. We're a walking haunted house, perhaps, if we don't make of life what we wanted...

I was pretty creeped out by the book, on a number of occasions. The Thurman House, as I say, is a very successful haunted house. In fact, in places, the way that the angles of the interior, the views around doors, the very geography of the place seemed skewed towards fear, reminded me a bit of The Grudge. The original version. The suburban nature of the Thurman House intensifies this horror, and in one memorable scene, the outside world seems to mock those inside the house - normality is only steps away, but further than can possibly be imagined. Many of the set pieces will live long in the mind, and there are ghoulish aspects to some of the events in the story that really are quite unsettling. One device towards the end of the book was shaping up, I thought, to be utterly terrifying, but was abandoned quite quickly in what was quite a rapid jump to conclusion when things got moving. Maybe, if I had any criticism, it might be the speed of this final unravelling.

I have seen this novel described as derivative, and think I would like to set off in its defence a bit. The prime focus of this seems to be IT by Stephen King. Or 'The Body'. While it's fair to make these comparisons, because there are obvious similarities, I'm not sure when it became the case that no one else was allowed to write any kind of coming of age/small town/supernatural fiction because King has already done it. In terms of coming of age and friendships, from American Graffiti, to The Diner, to The Four Feathers, Great Expectations - it's not as if the fundamentals are particularly unique. I don't think at all that The Guardians was any more derivative than anything else, and it would be a shame if Pyper gets branded this way, when I'll bet there is likely to be a wide variety of concerns in his work to come, and a lot more going on in his work than many writers. As I said at the top of the review you can compare The Guardians to King or Straub, not because he has copied them, but because he writes about similar things, with similar insight and style.

I hear that the book has been optioned for the big screen. I really hope this falls into the right hands, because the story has the makings of a fantastic horror film. Christian Bale as Trevor, I think. Slightly too young, but not far off the forty mark - an age which has a resonance as deep as the bells of Notre Dame in this superb novel.

REVIEW Darkside by Belinda Bauer

2011-01-18T00:13:00.000-08:00

" ... avoid the moor in those hours of darkness when the powers of evil are exalted ..." - The Hound of The Baskervilles

Belinda Bauer's Darkside is well-titled. It is a dark, dark novel. When humour does sneak in, it is of a fairly black variety; when peace, love and understanding appear, they do so against a backdrop of suffering and danger. Characters are constantly on the verge of being cut off in their remote location by howling snow, and total darkness is only offset by pin pricks of light from small clusters of isolated cottages. The atmosphere simply groans with elemental dread.

Against this backdrop, a series of crimes, hideous in execution, bring a blanket of suspicion and terror to a small closed community, where suddenly, no one can be trusted. If you're a seasoned crime reader, you'll be rubbing your hands with glee.

Darkside is Bauer's second novel to be set in the small Exmoor hamlet of Shipcott and its surroundings. Some years after the grim events of the first novel, things in the village take a turn to the darkness again after an elderly woman is murdered in her bed. The village Bobby, Jonas Holly, is soon fighting to keep his status against the brusque, and slightly demented, Detective Chief Inspector Marvel, and his team from Taunton. The story begins at this grim, outlandish point, and grows ever grimmer. The small town dynamics of the setting are to the fore almost immediately when we learn in passing that the doctor at the crime scene once vomited into a yard of ale after a rugby match. What marks the book instantly as special, however, is the natural way Bauer unfolds village observation, without taking anything away from what is an immensely chilling opening.

In fact, there is something of the horror novel about Darkside. The isolated rural town is a classic horror setting, and haphazard attempts to investigate anything going on in them harks back to The Wicker Man, for example. It's not just that one of the characters obsessively watches horror movies to balance the horror in her own life either, Darkside just has that creeping wash of dread over a tight knit community that creates the terror at the heart of books like Salem's Lot. Shipcott at one point seems plunged into a miasma of deep, insurmountable horror:

"But the Shipcott air itself had changed and all who lived there took in the toxins with every breath now. Suspicion, fear and confusion started to suffuse their beings and they looked at each other with new eyes ..."

In one nightmarish scene, Holly's Land Rover strikes a moor pony out in the dark, in the swirling snow. The horse is grotesquely injured. There is something deeply horrific about this moment, and Bauer captures the surreal madness of it all vividly. I put the book down at the end of this scene and could only say to myself, quietly, "Bloody Hell ..." Sometimes a great story well-told will have that effect.

As the novel progresses, these little vignettes continue, and Bauer seems to effortlessly punctuate the story with beautifully observed, haunted little snaps of imagery. Footsteps in the snow, an almost slow motion moment of dread as someone actually sees the killer but somehow doesn't see, the snow building, the creeping decay ...

Of course, the supernatural is no more walking abroad than the Hound of the Baskervilles stalks that other great West Country moor, Dartmoor. But horror and crime fiction often share the bus to work, and Darkside has enough dread in its boots to appeal to fans of the horror genre. The helter skelter tension of the ending (maybe a bit too pacey if anything) reminded me too of horror novels. Gripping stuff. I hope Bauer does turn her hand to the supernatural one day - as I said about Johan Theorin, I think that if she did, she'll scare us stupid.

The way in which the story and atmosphere of the first novel permeates the second, actually reminds me a lot of Johan Theorin. There is something very similar about these two writers and their work. In Theorin the characters are isolated by the sea, by being on an island, whereas in Bauer, they are isolated by the moor, by weather, by darkness. But the way characters interact with their setting, the atmosphere of it, is handled similarly well by both writers over a series of novels. I suppose, and this is probably a bit facile, but if you were to cross Johan Theorin and Reginald Hill, I think you'd be close to imagining Darkside.

Darkside is fantastic entertainment - I recommend it highly.

REVIEW 20th Century Ghosts by Joe Hill

2011-01-15T02:51:00.000-08:00

Review Preamble Alert!

There’s an old typewriter on the front cover of my copy of Joe Hill’s 20th Century Ghosts. Triple success: I love typewriters, thinking about book cover design, and I really enjoyed Hill’s book. So this has set me off on a brain ramble I’m afraid...

The typewriter on the cover is viewed hazily, as if through fire, or blood or rust - and it's not the version with the eerie man in the top right hand corner. It's a sort of dying, decaying industrial photoshop filter – what often gets tagged as ‘grunge’ on Shutterstock. I can’t stop thinking how moving the cover is – the typewriter being a sort of 20th Century Ghost of its own.

It died, I suppose you have to say, in the last Century. It sort of belongs there now, along with telegrams and penny farthing bikes. I used a typewriter all through University. I even got an antique Olivetti as a present last year. So I miss them. I miss Hemingway clunking away on some Spanish train, or Jack Torrance clacking away in the Overlook, Robert E Howard hunched over his machine while Conan sharpened his axe in the background. Episodes of The Twilight Zone were probably written on typewriters, John Cheever probably wrote ‘The Swimmer’ on one. Waugh, and Brideshead.

And now they’re gone. Soon, if we believe what we read in the media, books will go too, and we’ll have to look at book covers on a screen, the same way we see album covers in a tiny corner of Spotify. Not the way you’d sit poring over a gatefold LP for hours. Reading the details. It feels like we're going to lose texture, the tactile - a proper sense of printed colour. On the train you see rows of people swiping away at their iPads, like automatons in a Dr Who episode. Keyboards get quieter and quieter, the keys gradually disappearing before our eyes. Maybe eventually there’ll just be liquid paper and we’ll submerge in books, and writers will write in strange multi-touch gestures and thought controlled MS Word*. We’ll just float into books, one way or another. Anyone using any device with buttons that click will be next for the wicker man. Except it won’t be a wicker man – it’ll be an aluminium tube or something.

Pure hell. Maybe I should start getting into Steampunk stuff. Because I am going to miss buttons, mechanics and clunky old bits and bobs. I’m writing this on a stern Thinkpad as we speak – no more metal tablets of polished glass is my resolution. Yes, the cover of 20th Century Ghosts just made me think all this. Whoever the designer was, thank you. You reminded me that the machinery of Jack and the Overlook, the click and the clack, the great supernatural writing of the 20th Century, is all passed, and getting further away. The process of creating the stories I love has changed for ever. This is a ramble, yes, but it's hard not to ponder an era that has gone for good.

Except it hasn’t quite. Not in terms of the soul of it all. Step forward, writers like Joe Hill and books like 20th Century Ghosts. Something about the fantastical, psychological, romantic and haunting stories in this collection seemed to belong to an earlier age, a typewriter age. They seemed to have something of the rhythm of the typewriter, almost as if I could hear the ghostly clatter between the lines. They were filled too with references to the golden ages of pulp horror, and referenced magazines, films, stories all the time. Yes, the machine may be gone, but something of it remains.

The "Ghosts" are varied - sometimes actual phantoms (like the ultra chilling girl in the cinema in '20th Century Ghost'), sometimes memories, or hopes and dreams or thwarted love. Sometimes they are real demons; 'Best New Horror' is grotesque and an object lesson in building suspense. Children feature often in the stories, and the work often meditates, I think, on the way that childhood memories will haunt our adulthood. This is often expressed through extremes of emotional response in the stories, most particularly in the tour de force that is the closing 'Voluntary Committal'. This story takes the concept of things seeming to disappear from our lives as we grow older to quite a different level altogether!

Another stand-out is the frankly terrifying 'The Black Phone' which has an ingenious and extremely unsettling conceit at its heart that I won't spoil here. Days went by before I read the next story in the book, I can tell you. 'The Cape' is another stunning story, and one that led me to wonder how much of the fantastic in each story could perhaps be metaphorical, imaginary even - in the minds of the narrators and characters who, in a way, haunt the stories themselves.

I have already slightly broken an intention to never mention Joe Hill's Dad in this review (typewriters and Torrance though - impossible not to reference!) and I'm going to have to let it fall apart now. But for good reason, I think. What I have always loved about Stephen King is the humanity at the heart of his work, and the sense of love between his characters that just echoes the reality of how our feelings work, how families work, how couples work. People aren't elevated to the role of tragic hero or philosopher from nowhere: they are just who they are, fighting to save themselves, the people they love, their sanity. Stephen King is just a damn fine writer who understands the human condition very well, and just happens to write horror novels. Now I haven't bought Horns yet, but I liked Heart-Shaped Box and I loved this collection, and I'm quite prepared to say that one way in which Joe Hill is like his Dad, is in his way of capturing the humanity of the people he writes about. 'Better Than Home', for example, fairly broke my heart when I read it.

It's taken me a while to get round to this book, and I have to thank someone on Twitter for getting me to take it down from the shelf. They said something like: "Isn't it hard sometimes when you're reading 20th Century Ghosts not to burst out crying?". Yes, it is. The book is often very moving, and to return to my pre-review ramble, seems somehow to have distilled an earlier time, and in so doing, makes the reader keenly aware of fragility, impermanence and loss.

*Scrivener will save us : )

BOOK OF THE YEAR 2010 The Darkest Room by Johan Theorin

2010-12-31T00:21:00.000-08:00

"The dead are our neighbours everywhere on the island, and you have to get used to it."

"It is bitter mid-winter on the Swedish island of Öland, and Katrine and Joakim Westin have moved with their children to the boarded-up manor house at Eel Point. But their remote idyll is soon shattered when Katrine is found drowned off the rocks nearby. As Joakim struggles to keep his sanity in the wake of the tragedy, the old house begins to exert a strange hold over him.

As the end of the year approaches, and the infamous winter storm moves in across Öland, Joakim begins to fear that the most spine-chilling story he’s heard about Eel Point might indeed be true: that every Christmas the dead return..."

I came across Johan Theorin at the tail end of a fairly major Henning Mankell readathon early this year. I love Mankell's books, and now that I had read all the Wallanders found myself looking for something with a similarly Swedish chill. I ended up with Johan Theorin's Echoes from the Dead, which I enjoyed a very great deal. But it wasn't particularly like Mankell, nor was it much like Stieg Larsson ("If you're a fan of Stieg Larsson you'll LOVE this" shouts the book cover). No, this was something different. Theorin may be Swedish, there may be crimes to solve, but in many ways that's where comparisons with Mankell and Larsson end for me.

Echoes from the Dead is the first of a quartet of novels set on the Baltic island of Öland. The Darkest Room is the second. The next in the series comes out in the UK in June 2011. I can not wait to read it. You see, something magical happened within a few chapters of The Darkest Room - the setting and characters, the "feel" of the first novel were gently re-introduced, either as explicit parts of the narrative, or incidental - a very strong continuation of the building of the colour and atmosphere of the world Theorin was creating. Aspects of the island created in the first novel simply re-appeared like old friends, familiar directions and geography. A bit, it has to be said, like the Maine settings of Stephen King. This may seem obvious - write a bunch of books set in the same area and this will happen - but it is a real skill to do this well, to do it seamlessly. In other words, to create a fully functioning imaginary place within a real place.

The Darkest Room also ramped up a supernatural, folkloric element that had been strong in the first book, but now took on a more central role - to the extent that there are moments of genuine eeriness. At their heart, these are crime novels, but they are crime novels that simply exist in a world where the supernatural is somehow part of the fabric of everyday life. In a way, Theorin's work reminds me a bit of the Orkney-set short stories of George Mackay Brown, and how folk tale and reality sit beside each other with ease in those pieces. Often The Darkest Room creates real scares, and very convincing moments of chill and dread. If Theorin ever writes an out and out ghost novel, watch out, he really will scare your wits from their moorings.

It is no surprise then that in an interview on his website, Theorin admits to a strong liking for Stephen King, and Peter Straub and his "strange and beautiful novels". This description could easily apply to Theorin's own work. There is even some element of Magic Realism in his work as dimensions pass gently together, like figures in the island mist, crossing the marshland, but always accepted as just part of the logical progress of the novel. Theorin superbly weaves in stories from the island folklore tradition, particularly through the old sea captain Gerlof. Bizarre, often scary little vignettes appear throughout the story - creating a wonderful backdrop for the mystery unfolding.

No real surprise either that Shade Point would choose a book featuring abandoned lighthouses as Book of the Year 2010 - but this novel really did stand out from all the rest this year. The people, the places and the folkloric imagination of the novel appealed to me a very great deal, and I often find myself daydreaming about making a visit to Öland. It's on the must-go list. As if anticipating how fascinating his imaginary take on a very real place might be to some readers, the books even feature photographic sections at the end, more history, more information, more mystery...

It is a happy accident of the massive hype over Scandinavian crime fiction that Johan Theorin has been published in this country. He sits apart from easy genre classification and is arguably tacking a different course to many novelists he might be lumped in with. He is a writer, I think, deeply interested in the supernatural, in geography and identity, in history and people and the way these all work together to form narratives about our place in the universe and how we understand it and come to terms with it. His novels openly suggest that there may be more to life and the world than we think, and that all things may not be as they seem. He is also just a wonderful storyteller, one you could imagine being just as comfortable telling a ghostly yarn by some winter fireside in Öland as the swirling snow outside builds into a blizzard in the darkness and the old house begins to creak.

REVIEW Under The Dome by Stephen King

2010-12-29T00:28:00.000-08:00

"Big Jim was in the saddle now, and once guys like him were in it, they tended to ride hard. Sometimes until the horse collapsed beneath them."

Under The Dome is an extraordinary novel. Epic.

On The Beach; The Road; Z for Zacharia; Lake Wobegon Days; Dylan's Lily, Rosemary and The Jack of Hearts; First Blood; Escape from New York; King's own The Stand; Blood Meridian; Cool Hand Luke; 1984; Animal Farm; All Quiet on the Western front; the stories of John Cheever; the siege of Leningrad; The Moon is Down; The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich ... All of this and more flitted across my memory as I read this giant book over two days. This is a novel that makes you think. Big style.

I'm a Stephen King fan, and have been since the 1980s. I lost him a bit in the late nineties, but came back into the fold about three years ago. Fooled yet again by reviews, distracted by other stuff, I missed a lot of his books - stuck out in a King-free wilderness, inside my own Dome. Genre fiction dips in and out of streetlights as you get older - sometimes, well, life is scary and weird enough. But I picked up Bag of Bones, re-read a few, caught up on the very recent ones - enjoyed Duma Key and Cell a lot. Hey, he doesn't count as genre fiction anyway! What was I thinking?! After this blast of research and recall I didn't subscribe at all to the idea his powers had waned - but would say I wasn't feeling it as much as I did the first read of Salem's Lot, or Christine, The Shining. No problems with that - if I wasn't as convinced as I was when I was 19 that he was an almighty juggernaut of a writer on a par with Hemingway or Hamsun, I still thought he was, well, basically brilliant. It was good to get re-acquainted.

Then this. Under The Dome. Honestly, this book is an all out stunner - possibly, in fact, one of the best books he has ever written. Possibly one of the most enjoyable books I have ever read by anyone. Under the Dome was even a Christmas present last year, and it had taken me a year to get round to reading it! Too big? Check. Sort of unconvinced by the basic premise? Check? Credit card bills to worry about? Check. Yes, lots of stuff got in the way. This Christmas comes around and I think, enough. Let's read this. Sometimes you just have to trust the guy who built The Overlook.

Even though there is now a sort of general literati acceptance of King ("The greatest popular novelist of our day" proclaims The Guardian on the dustjacket) it hasn't always been so, and I'm not sure whether I completely believe in lots of it still. In fact, I feel a bit ashamed for not sticking with King the whole journey the way I have done with, say, Bruce Springsteen - believe me, The Boss may be a bit of a darling now, but there were times when liking him was not cool, not cool at all. So I do get a sense of some of this Stephen King 'The Dickens of Our Time' stuff being, well, ever so slightly unsure of itself. You think, do some of the people who say this stuff know all his work - have they even read Pet Sematary and love it like I do - or are they just responding to the mega, mega sales figures? Sometimes you read things and they don't seem to be describing Stephen King - not the one you know, at any rate. A Stand by Me King, a Shawshank King, maybe - but the Arnie Cunningham King, the King that brought back the cat?

Then you read something like Under The Dome, and you think, get over yourself - whether they believe it or not doesn't matter, because what they are saying is true of itself, and it's absolutely necessary that something we've known all along is at last more widely declared. Sort of like Apple computers being the best, except without the steady rise in BS from the source itself.

Under the Dome is so huge in scale, yet so intricately put together, so overflowing with characters, yet so detailed and moving in the telling of their individual stories, that I'd like to think it will have some of the literary "establishment" slack-jawed in wonder. This man really can tell a story, he can marshal an army of characters and events and links in the telling of it, he can direct them like a General, and he has the ability to connect us deeply with his imaginary people - so deeply that sometimes the tears will stand in your eyes. Sure, he hasn't quite managed that so well in recent books, but bloody hell, he does it with this one. And then some. It is a thing of awe really, how well all this is put together.

That basic premise, I mentioned? A small town in Maine is inexplicably enclosed within an invisible but virtually impermeable dome of unknown construction - tens of thousands of feet high, and similarly deep. After the initial chaos and destruction wreaked on fast moving traffic on the land and in the air, the town settles into a siege like mentality - while the forces of US Army and Intelligence muster on the other side of the structure to figure it all out, and try increasingly desperate methods of breaching the dome. Meanwhile, encased from the outside world, the inside turns rotten. Under the despotic rule of Second Selectman, Big Jim Rennie, the little town of Chester's Mill is plunged into a darkness of mayhem and corruption. Only a small band of revolutionaries, led by an initially unlikely spokesman, are left to try to fight back as the town descends the abyss, while the atmosphere in the dome heats up, heats up and heats up ...

As the despair and depravity takes hold, you start to realise that what is causing the Dome is not so important as your initial concerns about the premise might have suggested. It still isn't, for me, even now that the book is finished. Because, somehow, I think that would be missing the point. The Dome is just taken for granted, disbelief suspended, within pages. It just is. Its invisibility - at least until the atmosphere gets bad - is hugely important. Stephen King understands small towns - he really, really does. He knows that to a large degree they live under a dome, in a bubble, behind walls - anyway. The arrival of an actual barrier only brings out more fully what was there all along - allows the egomania of Rennie to become something much, much worse, for example, allows the good and even the not so good people to take huge brave steps into greatness. We are all under the Dome, under the microscope.

King understands the microcosmic nature of small towns, their almost sociopathological "separateness" from the outside world, while loving the ability of some of their inhabitants to rise miles above it. He gives small town politics a kicking where it needs it - and from here to breakfast time at that - and it is something to rejoice. There he is like Dickens, definitely, championing as best he can the outsider and the downtrodden, lampooning and despising the bloated and buffoonish - or in Rennie's case, the all out abominable. If the Dome was suddenly to disappear, would it stop? Would he stop? What would make it stop, this clawing for power? Who makes the difference?

The same heroes perhaps that you root for all through the final third of this amazing book, as they make do and mend with what they have to run a hospital, as they fight to the last in the face of brutality and horror, as they flee to the hills as the final battle rages below them? As they make sacrifices? I think so. How many characters are there, how many do we know, how many do we grieve for as this massive book rolls on? Too many to count, half a town's worth probably. The sheer skill in the storytelling is that it all hangs together, that even in cameos and vignettes, King creates more genuine insight, more emotion than seems possible to imagine many writers managing to achieve to this scale. The ordinariness of the sorrow is sometimes the most unbearable, because it is the most believable. Real people die here, all the time. All day long. The reader's desire for these people to succeed, to stay alive, drives the page-turning like an addiction.

Under The Dome is now one of my favourite Stephen King books - ever. I loved it.

REVIEW Whistle and I'll Come to You (2010)

2010-12-25T03:53:00.000-08:00

In terms of TV at Christmas, I always scan the listings for any ghost story adaptations. In recent years, ghosts, Christmas and the BBC have been very good chums, and it has been great entertainment on the whole. We've had the Crooked House sequence by Mark Gatiss, a Turn of the Screw adaptation, A View from a Hill and Number 13. These followed in the tradition of earlier classics such as The Signalman and A Warning to the Curious. I always harbour the hope that some organisation will bundle all these together in one fantastic box set - the BFI, for instance, who have released some before on DVD, although sadly now hard to get.

If such a box set was to suddenly materialise, like a ghost, it would of course include the film that many consider the inspiration behind the whole tradition - Jonathan Miller's 1968 masterpiece for the Omnibus series, Whistle and I'll Come to You. Based, like many of these films, on a short story by M.R. James, it has deservedly become known as a British supernatural film classic. It stars Michael Hordern as an uptight academic who stumbles upon a haunted whistle while visiting a Templar graveyard on the eerie Norfolk coast. It is one of those films that has achieved iconic status, particularly for its stunning finale.

Little wonder then, that there was some excitement - and a smidgen of concern amongst the devout - when it was learned that the BBC were to broadcast an updated version this Christmas. Trepidation was to some extent allayed when it was learned that the wonderful John Hurt would be playing the lead role (James Parkin) - even if reservations did remain when it was revealed that the story would be set in the present day. It went on air here in the UK last night, Christmas Eve...

I'm not as bothered by remakes as I used to be. Or, for that matter, modern day re-imaginings - thanks largely to the BBC's own Sherlock. And so, when the whistle becomes a wedding ring, the academic becomes an astronomer and is given an ailing wife in a nursing home backstory, I stuck with it. In part this was easy to do because it was so well made, having some of the misty, grainy aesthetic of Japanese horrors like Reincarnation with its amazing hotel set, and because Hurt was frankly superb in the lead. Like Hordern in the 1968 version, much of the haunting happens on Hurt's face, and the humanity of it all, the suffering, is carried in every line and furrow of his increasingly tortured expression. He is just brilliant in this.

The deserted hotel he stays in is incredibly creepy, and the scares as Parkin is haunted on the beach are very well handled. There are also some superbly eerie events up in his ghostly hotel room that were really quite frightening - I won't say what they were. All in, I was really impressed, and will watch it again when it is repeated, just to enjoy the magnificent turn by Hurt and the superb film making.

It is not, sadly, an unqualified success. Leaving aside issues about whether it remains sufficiently faithful to its source, I really didn't mind that, the film was still left wanting in one key area for me: the ending. I won't go into detail about it - I don't want to ruin it for those who haven't seen it - I will just say that I was left rattling through explanations and scenarios to find a suitable rationale for the conclusion. I probably came up with one or two that will do, but, and this is an important 'but', I would have preferred an ending that just made instant sense. Frankly, this sort of "required untangling" often blows the atmosphere in supernatural movies, retreating the viewer behind the glass wall again, and just diminishing the overall effect. I'm not saying the ending was a complete disaster, or didn't in the end make some kind of sense, just that in some ways I had already anticipated it, while in other more confusing ways finding the imagistic handling of it finally confusing. And that's a shame.

Having said all that though, never mind: I still loved nearly all of it, and it will easily be head and shoulders above other stuff on the box over the festive season. And, John Hurt is just a national treasure.

REVIEW In The Shadow of Gotham by Stefanie Pintoff

2010-12-18T23:03:00.000-08:00

"Then maybe you need to think more like a ghost ... in other words, where does a man like him go when he needs to disappear? If you can figure that out, then you might better your odds of finding him. And you, of all people, should know the places a man can disappear in the city."

All my life I have loved Sherlock Holmes. When other reading fads have come and gone, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories have stayed with me. A side effect of this has been a complete weakness for historical detective fiction set in the same era or thereabouts. Stefanie Pintoff's In The Shadow of Gotham takes place in New York in 1905, and therefore was always going to be something I would want to read.

Already on her third book in the United States - Pintoff has won an Edgar award - this, her first novel, has only just come out in paperback in the UK this year. In The Shadow of Gotham is the first in a series featuring Detective Simon Ziele and tells the tale of his hunt for a brutal killer, aided by pioneering criminologist, Andrew Sinclair. It is followed by A Curtain Falls and in 2011, Secret of the White Rose.

I've read slightly sniffy reviews of the book here and there - suggesting a lack of complexity in the solution - but I liked it a great deal. I liked it because it is just good, escapist mystery fiction. The period details are handled well, and don't intrude like a Scrivener research board that has taken over the whole novel. I don't know much about New York in 1905, either, so I'm not likely to throw the book down in dismay at some perceived historical inaccuracy. The novel is a mystery thriller and it has to be read in that spirit, before the winter fire, glass of brandy in hand - as an entertainment. It succeeds in that sense admirably, I think.

Having mentioned Conan Doyle, perhaps he's not the most obvious marker for potential readers. I have seen comparison with Caleb Carr's The Alienist - which is fair, although that book is much more gruesome - and it's also not unlike Jed Rubenfeld's The Interpretation of Murder. If you liked either of those books, there should be something here for you. It actually also reminded me a lot - partly because of the interplay between Ziele and Sinclair's daughter in law Isabella - of the Murdoch stories of Maureen Jennings.

There are moments where aspects of the likely denouement are telegraphed just a bit too obviously, and the partnering of Ziele and Sinclair and his team happens just slightly too easily, but I found myself not particularly bothered. It was just a book that had me on its side the whole way through. I liked Zeile as a character, I was interested in the New York that bustled around the story, and I was impressed by the dark, wintry atmosphere that Pintoff created. Every now and again you just want to be entertained - not completely bent out of shape with plot intricacies and metaphysical corsetry that crushes the story.

Hello, Detective Simon Ziele - I'm glad you're around.

REVIEW The End of The Line

2010-12-12T00:07:00.000-08:00

It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.

— Rod Serling

Why the Twilight Zone reference to open a review of an underground-themed Horror anthology? Well, and I hope this is broadly understood as a positive, it's because the altered perceptions and twisted endings of that classic series were more in my mind while reading the stories in The End of the Line, than, say, a collected ghost stories. I'm never too bothered about the fine borders between genres, but I like thinking about them, so would even go as far as to say that one or two of these stories are more psychological sci-fi than horror, and often the more successful for it. In fact, on more than one occasion I found myself thinking long for 'Tharg's Future Shocks'.

Nearly all the successes in the anthology, certainly for me, are more about leaving lasting impressions and fixing images and ideas in our unconscious than, say, trying to scare the living daylights out of the reader. Play with their head, yes, terrorise them, no. It may seem a grim damnation for a horror anthology, but I wasn't particularly scared by the stories - except once or twice. But this isn't meant to be criticism, because in the end it didn't really matter. Lots of the stories were about bending perception, luring the reader into bizarre mindscapes and familiar yet unfamiliar territories. I enjoyed these stories for what they were, and in some cases, for what they have left behind: disturbing little imps of imagery that get on the train with me, hang around the station at night ... In time, perhaps, some of them will bed in, and stay. Sure, I expected and would have liked to cower under the bedcovers in sheer fright a bit more, but never mind.

Backtracking, this collection of broadly Horror-genre short stories is focussed on underground networks of some kind, whether these be traditional tubes and metros or more adventurous imaginings. The selection features writers I'm not too familiar with, and several that I am: Adam Nevill, for example, or Ramsey Campbell. Like all anthologies, I enjoyed some stories more than others. The tales all play on fears and imaginations - claustrophobia, entombment, disaster - and dwell on intersections and redirections in the normal patterns of things. They imagine horrors underground, and horrors in the minds of those who go underground, or even, like Dostoyevsky's Underground Man, those whose minds are doing the going underground. The stories that take the thematic suggestions of underground as their centre, will probably sustain longer than those who use it largely as a setting.

The story that scored the most direct hit in terms of my own basic fears of underground train travel was James Lovegrove's chilling 'Siding 13'. Anyone with even the faintest tendency to claustrophobia on the tube will find much that is ghoulish and appalling about this tale. Adam Nevill's hellish 'On All London Underground Lines' plays on similar fears, but plunges the reader into some seventh circle of infernal despair in the process. Are they zombies? Are they demons? Are they feeding?

I also liked 'The Lure' by Nicholas Royle a great deal. There is something insidious about this creepy Paris-based yarn that has stuck with me - perhaps the disturbing man in the mask, perhaps the breathless narrator as he descends into the surreal and the damned, literally and metaphorically. Perhaps it's the slightly subversive take on a Paris affair, like a Kristin Scott Thomas movie crossed with Lovecraft. Anyway, this theme, one way or another, of descent and disarray and the reversal of normal traffic, normal progress or understanding, is common to many of the stories. Going underground, as I say, travelling into some interior state, happens often. Gary McMahon inventively plunges his narrator into similar circumstances, but underwater, in Antarctica.

Conrad Williams' 'Exit Sounds' took this movingly into the world of the personal, into the depths of grief and loss. Mark Morris took us down a mineshaft - in a place eerily reminiscent of Morwellham Quay here in Devon - and writes the nearest, I think, to a traditional ghost story. Pat Cadigan's 'Funny Things' is like a tube map of memories, emotions, and inchoate loss - directions are there, but we get lost, we get off on wrong stops, nothing is as it seems.

Christopher Fowler's 'Down' is my favourite. The narrator's reason for being in a hellish circumstance is completely plausible. When he becomes isolated in this circumstance, it is entirely believable. The story is genuinely unsettling and haunted. It ends superbly.

Look, there's a signpost up ahead. It's for the tube. Ignore it, take the bus instead. It's just hell down there.

Save Undershaw

2010-12-06T06:10:00.000-08:00

Time to take a few moments out from the business of reviewing books and staring wistfully out over the sea.

It seems that the house where Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote The Hound of the Baskervilles (a book that changed my life if ever there was one), and met Bram Stoker, amongst much more, is soon to be lost. You can read more about the campaign at www.saveundershaw.com, join up to Facebook and Twitter, write to protest, and get to know all about the house and its significance.

I'm in favour of supporting author's houses in general, but would certainly suggest that some are more important than others. I'd add Undershaw to the list of must-save properties. Once they're gone, they're gone, and I don't stand with hugely expensive reconstructions - but Undershaw, at its core, is as it was in Sir Arthur's lifetime. It is where some of the most enduring literature ever was created and sent out to be read by millions. To still be read by millions.

I don't need to spend time justifying the importance of Sherlock Holmes, Watson, and their creator. If you're a visitor to Shade Point you probably need little convincing on that score. Some people, however, still need convincing of the huge loss to our collective mystery heritage about to take place at Undershaw, so please, lend your voice ...

The game is afoot!

Save Undershaw from WetherbyPond on Vimeo.

Horror and Urban Fantasy Reading Challenge 2011

2010-12-01T11:51:00.000-08:00

Right, madness it may be, but the occupant of Shade Point has signed up to the 24 book Horror & Urban Fantasy Reading Challenge 2011! Only 24 books? No problem. (Note to self: hmm, that bravado won't last). Visit www.bookchickcity.com for more info, or click on the macabre yet cheeky new sidebar fancy to your left!

I predict the challenge will begin at Shade Point on New Year's Day, with a hangover, and probably zombies. What the book will be about, I don't know ; )

REVIEW The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters

2010-11-28T01:45:00.000-08:00

THERE ARE POTENTIAL SPOILERS IN THIS PIECE, I'm afraid ...

The mailboat has brought over some fantastic books of late. The last few I have reviewed, certainly, are books I enjoyed a very great deal. I can now add The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters to the success list.

It has taken me a heck of a long time to get around to reading it. I'm not quite sure why. Partly, it was silliness: I read a piece somewhere when it first came out in paperback saying that it wasn't scary enough. Also, and this maybe marks me as some extra kind of buffoon, but the minute something is on the Man Booker list, for some reason I just don't want to read it. (Note to self, ask analyst friend in Chicago about this). I might be a buffoon on that score, but the person who wrote the review overweighting the relevance of the scare quotient may be close behind me. I say this because appreciating The Little Stranger is way, way more complicated than this single issue, and it actually is scary ... more of which later.

Now, SPOILER LINKS SPOILER LINKS, The Little Stranger has created a great deal of debate and discussion, which is often the mark of a great book. This collogue, in large, centres on a crucial aspect of the denouement and comes from the reader's understanding of the narrative voice. Now, that's as far down the road to ruining your enjoyment of the book as I should probably go - suffice to say, once you've actually read it, you can join Waters herself for a discussion of it here and a great and continuing debate over at Asylum. I did. And I did, because I loved the book, and I loved the mystery of it.

It is just after World War Two, in Warwickshire in England. Austerity and rationing and the trauma of conflict are the spectres haunting the countryside. The Ayres family, landed gentry, are the occupants of the once dazzling Hundreds Hall, which has now fallen on exceedingly hard times. Into the lives of faded aristo beauty, Mrs Ayres, her daughter Caroline and war-shattered son Roderick, comes non-descript, chip on shoulder, unambitious Dr Faraday. As the novel unfolds, the relationship deepens, and apart from dips into related narrative, the story is told largely in Faraday's voice.

There is something of a cross between Charles Ryder of Brideshead Revisited and Arthur Kipps from The Woman in Black about Faraday initially. Certainly, Ryder's obsession with Brideshead and its occupants is very strongly recalled, but this is an alternative Brideshead - as if that grand house were re-imagined by Poe. In fact, as they are huddled together in their motley collection of furs and outdoor clothes, ghosts of the past round their dwindling fire, the aristocrats are so ghoulish they reminded me of the riders in Cormac McCarthy's darkest masterpiece, the incomparable Blood Meridian. An upper class family from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (exaggeration alert ...).

The continuing story grows darker and darker, and the reader is embedded there like some unwilling bystander, aghast as events turn deadlier and more grotesque. Rather like In Search of A Distant Voice (which I reviewed last week) there is a continued creepiness and edginess, which although it won't satisfy those wanting to be terrified out of their wits, builds to a darker, more macabre atmosphere that will stay with you a long time. And, like Yamada, it also builds to a set-piece which I would argue is terrifying, and frankly as tense as hell. If they make a film of it - please do - this scene in the right hands could end up being one of those classic moments of scary cinema. I can see Mark Gatiss in the Faraday role.

The ending of the book (SPOILER POSSIBILITY!) is where the debate will come in for some. It is certainly one of those novels where one's interpretation of the ending will be vitally important to the novel's lasting impact, particularly for those of us who want to be certain what it means. See the links above for more on that. What I will say, however, is that for those of us immersed in the mysterious genre, we will maybe be more on Waters' wavelength from the very start. Without meaning to be pompous about it, genre fans know the rules, we know the references. I'm not saying that ultimately that means we'd be right in any interpretation of this novel - just that we'd be prepared in advance to expect a debate. That Waters knows our genre is evident from this page on her website, where she lists her favourite ghost stories.

Whatever, The Little Stranger is a wonderful book. It acts as a massive metaphor - and I mean that in a good way - for the passing of an aristocratic ideal - but it also works as a laser sharp dissection of the darker ambitions and desires of human beings. Do these desires live outside of us, do they have an energy of their own, a compulsion of their own? The novel is written beautifully, paced superbly and comfortably sits on the crossover line between establishment literary fiction and genre classic.

A lighthouse is not like a mansion, but this one has a similar roof to one in The Little Stranger - it's in the keepers' house, bulged with water, decayed and waiting ...

FILMS Jane Eyre

2010-11-26T00:57:00.000-08:00

Jane Eyre is one of the legendary novels for the mysterious fiction genre. A writer I know says that, for her, "it just all begins with Jane Eyre." Plenty of film and TV adaptations have come and gone - the most recent BBC one I liked a great deal - but the trailer below suggests that a bit of a Gothic delight might be on its way. The BBC are involved in this big screen adaptation as well, along with Focus Pictures and Ruby Films. You can visit the official website here.

Of course, trailers are always misleading, but goodness, this looks like it could be a bit special. So many of the features that have come to define what is mysterious fiction come from this book, and although the purist in us may worry it's going to be over the top, it's hard not to think they have captured the eerie desolate atmosphere of the novel that draws us to it again and again. It has been cornered often as a period romance, and there's part of that in it, but Jane Eyre is also very spooky. It features many of the conventions in horror and mystery writing that sustain to this day, and this new film adaptation really does look as if it has set out to bring this to the fore - crumbling ruins, dark moors, rain, lightning, mysterious doors and corridors, noises in the night, the dread of the darkness and the unknown ...

REVIEW In Search of a Distant Voice by Taichi Yamada

2010-11-25T04:19:00.000-08:00

Turn to face this way -
Mine as well, this loneliness
The end of autumn.

For some reason, having always intended to read Strangers by Taichi Yamada, I haven't yet. I'm going to get a move on and read it immediately now that I have read another of Yamada's books, In Search of A Distant Voice.

I have read reviews of this short novel where people take issue with some of the jacket puff that suggest it is a "scary" book. I can sympathise with this to some extent. But, Yamada's is just a different type of supernatural writing, and it works extremely well in its own way. In fact, the patience with which the novel is built to its conclusion is to create, I think, a specific and extremely chilling point of tension at the very end. In some ways it is a surreal piece, in others almost hyper real. If ghosts really do exist, might this be how they really are? Is Yamada travelling out there on the edges, closer to an answer than most of us?

The book is about Kasama Tsuneo, an immigration officer in Tokyo, and how his interaction with a woman's ghostly voice in his own head/outside his head unseats his shambolic attempts to live an ordinary life. He is trying too hard to lead this normal life, see the frankly surreal engagement party scene, in order to escape a traumatic past. The novel winds its way towards his uncovering of the source of this voice, and the results of his attempts to make it corporeal.

I'm reading The Little Stranger at the moment, by Sarah Waters, and co-incidentally, a review blurb by Hilary Mantel on the jacket sums up In Search of A Distant Voice perfectly. Talking about the other book, obviously, Mantel uses the expression "the queasy borderlands between the supernatural and the psychopathological". This just is In Search of a Distant Voice. The events in the story are either the hallucinations of poor Tsuneo, or they are they intervention of a hidden dimension. Maybe they are both. The reader flits back and forth across this line with Tsuneo throughout the whole narrative, and this discomfort about what is actually happening is what finally makes the book haunting, creepy, disturbing ...

I liked it a very great deal. It is an eerie meditation on the nature of the supernatural, mental disintegration and total, utter human isolation. In fact, it reminded me very strongly of two books - books I read more than a decade ago - Knut Hamsun's Hunger and Notes from the Underground by Dostoyevsky. These are horror stories in their own way, ghost stories, that embed the reader in the mind of someone dismantling, fraying, falling. In Search of a Distant Voice tells of the unravelling of sanity, the possibility of our interaction with the beyond, and the terror of being human.

REVIEW The Anatomy of Ghosts by Andrew Taylor

2010-11-14T02:04:00.000-08:00

"The place was a trap, and animals caught in traps cannot escape one another."

Ah, it has been a fortunate reading week here on the rocky edge of Devon. First, Michelle Paver's chilling Dark Matter, and now The Anatomy of Ghosts, by Andrew Taylor, a contender for the best book I have read all year.

The title is partially misleading, in that this is not a conventional ghost story by any means. The haunting in these pages is more in the minds of the characters, more the trouble in their souls, memories and dreams, than in spectral happenings. But I say partially, because there are fleeting shades of the other kind too, barely understood by the characters, perhaps not even real, but all the more powerful for that. The climax of the novel is quite superb in this regard, and will stay with the reader for a very long time.

The novel is set in 1786, in the fictional Jerusalem College Cambridge, where the ghost of Sylvia Whichcote is said to be stalking the grounds only days after her death by drowning. One of the students, Frank Oldershaw, claims to have seen the ghost and having apparently lost his wits has been confined in an asylum. His mother, Lady Anne Oldershaw, recruits John Holdsworth, the author of a chapbook de-bunking ghosts (The Anatomy of Ghosts of the book's title), to travel to Cambridge to return her son to sanity. Holdsworth has more than his own share of ghosts to go with him, and we know from the outset that the investigation will tax him to the limit.

Once Oldershaw arrives at the College, we can delight in one of the tested and true mystery staples - the investigating outsider in cloistered community - that has produced some of the great classics. The Name of the Rose, is an example, or Death in Holy Orders by PD James and Dissolution by CJ Sansom. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane is another contemporary-ish example. My favourite is The Unburied by Charles Palliser. What this device does, I think, is increase the tension by allowing us to share the outsider status of the investigator, the paranoia engendered by a world unfamiliar only to our protagonist, but completely understood by the resident many. Who does Holdsworth trust? Who do we trust? Can we trust Holdsworth? Taylor's evocation of the ramshackle and slightly sinister college is outstanding. Ulimately, Holdsworth could disappear here and no one would know - he would simply be folded into the dark staircases and alleys and forgotten to an "outside" world.

It's clear early on that the solution to the mystery of Sylvia Whichcote's death will be earthbound, but it is also clear that the supernatural will play its part - not in some senses as part of the direct progress of the plot, but as something so ever-present as the weather or the change from day to night that it impinges on the actions of the characters and the atmosphere of the novel. It is all the more haunting for this, and these passages where dimensions brush past each other are beautifully written. It is such an effective treatment, and reveals so much more about our relationship with the unknown than many books with more scares, gore and ghouls per chapter than in this entire novel.

It is a thought provoking, wonderful book.

"More ghosts ... It seems that we constantly manufacture them. We are factories of ghosts."

REVIEW Dark Matter by Michelle Paver

2010-11-13T00:49:00.000-08:00

Michelle Paver is the author of the incredibly successful Chronicles of Ancient Darkness series for children, which is published in 36 countries. Dark Matter is her first adult ghost story.

Set in 1937 it concerns a very ill-fated British Arctic expedition to Spitsbergen, and in particular the traumatic experience of its wireless operator Jack. For various reasons Jack is forced to endure the endless dark of a Nordic winter on his own, in a small coastal hut in the sinister and remote bay at Gruhuken. Unbeknownst to the intrepid but naïve explorers, it is a place of terrible memory, fearsome reputation and supernatural menace...

Without meaning to be flippant at all, if you were to imagine a cross between Beryl Bainbridge’s The Birthday Boys, and Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black, you might very well have Dark Matter. It is a classic "Ghost Story" in the BBC Christmas tradition, and very successfully channels many conventions of the form. It is not as brilliantly realised or nerve-dredgingly scary as The Woman in Black, but this is no criticism; that novel remains one of the most superb modern renderings of the MR James storytelling ethos, if not the very best, and indeed was unlucky to not reap wider acclaim than it did, i.e. stacks of prizes. Not as good as the completely perfect then, Dark Matter is nonetheless still brilliant.

To keep the comparisons going, there is also in fact something of Anita Shreve’s The Weight of Water, The Riddle of the Sands and Conan Doyle’s The Lost World about Dark Matter. Even The Thing! It successfully challenges the psychological otherness of remote, dark, northern climes of Shreve, the Boys Own Adventure with barbed wire in the yarn of Childers, and the doomed exploration of Challenger and his cohorts to the place where no one has gone before. Bainbridge’s Birthday Boys are recalled in the innocence, bravery and class symbolism of the Dark Matter protagonists, while The Woman in Black, beyond just the genre similarities, is echoed – an important word that, if you read the book – echoed in the terrible isolation of the main character and the sheer dread that Paver brings up in the nets. All these comparisons are not meant to diminish Dark Matter, but to suggest the atmospheric company it keeps. And The Thing? Well, frozen location, menace, horror ... (Note to self: there is a remake of The Thing on the way - must worry a bit about this ...)

Dread is the key. The great ghost stories, for this reviewer at least, live completely in the world of dread – dread rather than shock or gore. If a ghost story is successful, then when you are reading it, and long after, dark staircases seem somehow darker, the wind seems to, well, whistle more, and there is strange movement in the trees, and noises at the window latch – even on modern windows where you don't have latches. This is all worked up patiently in good stories, so that when the dread becomes manifest, it is as if hands of ice have slipped around the reader’s shoulders, and they are afraid. Not shocked or repulsed, although these may be present sometimes, but afraid. Afraid of the dark. Of death. Of the unknown. Reading the book, not reading the book, it is just an ambience that surrounds you like the Gruhuken fog while a story works its way out of your imagination.

Paver successfully achieves this, quietly and steadily, and without the reader overtly being aware of it. Jack’s companions disappear from the scene naturally, but by the end, with what seems complete inevitability. The evocation of endless night in the long winters of the north is captured beautifully and accurately – Paver is a frequent traveller to these regions. Disbelief is suspended when Jack’s motivations for staying – as opposed to getting the hell out – are entangled in his strength of feeling for his colleagues, and a stiff upper lip determination not to let the side down. The Norwegian characters are not Scooby Doo or “Beware the Moors” stock character stereotypes, but seem real and make real moves, decisions and declaration. They are still “other” from Jack and his colleagues, but necessarily so – Dark Matter successfully captures the huge universe between the British middle class Jack and his champagne swilling Toff comrades, their idea of a shared world, and the Norwegian sailors, the landscapes and eternal night of Gruhuken.

And then there is the dark matter – what we know is there, but what remains mysterious. Dark Matter is alive with portents, signs, symbols, scares and ominous foreboding. The novel is determinedly in the atmosphere of the MR James, Le Fanu camp, in that it is a “Ghost Story”, an entertainment to scare us witless, but also a meditation on the unknown, the beyond, and thus, like all good ghost stories, carries with it that existential fear that is as dark and unfathomable as the blackest reaches of night endured by Paver’s characters. What is out there? What is it that we imagine, and what is it that we actually see and know? What is the other? What do we want it to be?

With Christmas on the way, Dark Matter is an absolutely perfect present to buy yourself. Pour a small measure of Three Barrels, turn down the lights and enjoy superb spookiness.

Now, was that a scratching at the door to the Keepers' House ... surely not ....

<p$1>

All Hallows Eve

2010-10-31T08:58:00.001-07:00

I intended to catch the mailboat yesterday, and go out to the mainland, but a writing deadline got in the way and I had to radio Ellen to say I would pass. I went down to the boathouse just the same and watched them as they rounded the point, the little boat bobbing and then diving in the growing surf. Ellen turned the searchlight onto the boathouse for a moment and I waved. The walk up to the Light was somewhat desolate, especially through the ruins of the keepers' house, a place I have never liked. I can't wait until I have raised enough money to do it up or knock it down. Such an eerie place. It occurred to me then what day it was to follow, and now here it is, and here I am, on Halloween, and the daylight is gradually beginning to fade.

Unusually I went downstairs this afternoon to bolt the door out to the keepers' house. What a superstitious fool I am!

Anyway, I have a nice bottle of brandy and Andrew Taylor's The Anatomy of Ghosts to keep me company ...

REVIEW The Haunting of James Hastings by Christopher Ransom

2010-10-31T05:12:00.000-07:00

Shade Point has two basic (light)house rules for reviews. Firstly, never write a review between the hours of midnight and three a.m. and secondly, try to avoid writing about books that I just didn't really enjoy - in any shape or form. Ellen, a friend of mine who works on the mailboat, she used to review yachting bits and bobs for a magazine, and she claimed there was just no point wasting time reviewing completely useless yachting bits and bobs when you could actually just be out yachting instead. I took this advice on board, as it were, and as a result will only review stuff that I think has something going for it. It doesn't need to be an all round success, there just needs to be some redeeming feature that made the book stick in the memory.

Which brings me neatly to The Haunting of James Hastings. If you buy this on the strength of the UK cover design, thinking you're in for an old school ghost story, you're going to be disappointed. That's not to say there aren't elements of a peat-smoky old ghost yarn in there, only that it's not all this book is about. I've read a few reviews of it already, and I think it's fair to say that I'm not the only one who has come away slightly bewildered by the mixture of different approaches going on here. If you were to take Stephen King, and the Connollys John and Michael, put them in a room until they designed a book together, on an off day for at least one of them, then you might end up with a plot like this. Oh, and that is another rule for Shade Point - I'm going to try to avoid re-telling plots or spoiling them.

So, it is a mixture of mercies. Which is one way of saying this is part atmospheric ghost story, part horror story, part mystery novel, part visceral/gore/action novel. With some added Eminem stuff, in the guise of one of the characters in the novel, Ghost - an incredibly successful rapper based on the very same Eminem. And on the whole, I don't think it actually all works.

Which leads me to why I'm reviewing it. It's a shame it doesn't work on the whole, because in places, it is clear that Christopher Ransom can handle spine tingling dread as well as anyone. There are set pieces - particularly in the first half of the book - where Ransom creates very real tension, and often some very real scares. It is just a pity that these instances are surrounded by awkward dialogue and confusing shifts in narration, plot development and characterisation - not to mention genre. This is no better exemplified than in two chapters side by side, where the main character hides from a spectral visitor in a perfectly achieved atmosphere of dread in the first (ch. 27 for anyone interested - a tour de force) and then in the succeeding chapter seems to shake off the experience far too easily after which the novel introduces an entirely unbelievable character, some excruciating dialogue and jumps back into some kind of different story altogether - thus undoing the brilliant work before. It is not a declining of tension before another scare that is achieved - more a breaking of belief in the story.

If you are interested in mining for the seam, and frankly there's not much else to do in a non-functioning tidebound lighthouse, then this book is worth reading, particularly for those studying the prose techniques of terror. Otherwise, you may well not like it. One Amazon reviewer said, "This book started out well but quickly deteriorated into stupidity". I wouldn't go quite that far, although I was disappointed by it. And I wouldn't go that far, because should he choose to go in that direction, Ransom could write a very credible, very, very scary addition to the ghost story canon. The Haunting of James Hastings starts out as if it was going to go that way, but ended up somewhere else completely. Mostly it is reminiscent of those brilliant horror movies that are ruined in the last 20 minutes by an ending that doesn't make sense with what has gone before or that takes inexplicable liberties with our well-earned understanding of the characters and their motives thus far. But a superb stylist Ransom can be, and I will read his next book just in case ...

REVIEW The Small Hand by Susan Hill

2010-10-23T06:28:00.001-07:00

It's very appropriate that the first book to arrive on the mailboat should be The Small Hand by Susan Hill. I say this, because one of my favourite books ever is The Woman in Black - one of the most intelligent, beautifully written and, frankly, downright terrifying ghost stories I have ever read. Horses for courses, some people don't find it scary - but I do. Nerve twistingly so.

Hill followed The Woman in Black with The Mist in the Mirror, and The Man in the Picture, and while both had their moments, they were sadly not a patch on their esteemed elder. I say sadly, because written by anyone else they would have been acclaimed; it was just that they stood against such a fantastic book and suffered slightly for this, I think. Unfortunately, The Small Hand follows suit. It just isn't as jaw dropping and unforgettably chilling as Woman in Black. That said, I will go out on a limb (ironic considering my location!) and say that is better than the previous two, and better on one vitally important point: it is scarier. While you are unlikely to lock all the doors, turn on all the lights and drink a pint of brandy (logical behaviour while reading The Woman in Black) there are moments where the tell-tale prickles will begin on your neck and arms, and you will feel that essential ghost story pull towards dread. Not always, or enough, but often. There's some more information about the book in the video below.
Hill has a natural gift for the timing of fear in a narrative, and the way that prose must be fluid for the creepiness to work. As a writer, she's not capable of clunkiness and so The Small Hand is always compelling and readable. It's definitely recommended here, and did on occasion have me checking behind me as I went down the spiral staircase to close the front gate, which always seems to spring open, no matter what I do.

If you loved The Woman in Black, you have probably bought this already. If you didn't, you're not likely to like this, and if you haven't read The Woman in Black, then I envy you immensely. It is a masterpiece awaiting you.

The waves are high tonight. They thump against the base of the Light like angry giants and it is only October.

<p$1><p$1>